The western mosquitofish, , is a freshwater poecilid fish native to the southeastern United States but with a global distribution due to widespread human introduction. has been used as a model species for a broad range of evolutionary and ecological studies. We sequenced the genome of a male to facilitate genetic studies in diverse fields including invasion biology and comparative genetics. We generated Illumina short read data from paired-end libraries and proximity-ligation libraries. We obtained 54.9× coverage, N50 contig length of 17.6 kb, and N50 scaffold length of 6.65 Mb. Compared to two other species in the Poeciliidae family, has slightly fewer genes that have shorter total, exon, and intron length on average. Using a set of universal single-copy orthologs in fish genomes, we found 95.5% of these genes were complete in the assembly. The number of transposable elements in the assembly is similar to those of closely related species. The high-quality genome sequence and annotations we report will be valuable resources for scientists to map the genetic architecture of traits of interest in this species.
