Hi Leandra, that sort of dynamic data discovery user interface with clicking on keywords and sorting you describe isn't really within the scope of story maps, which tend to show authored narratives or fixed inventories of places.
One possible Story Map approach to look at is using Story Map Shortlist to present a set of species and their locations, and use different tabs in the Shortlist to present subsets of them according to different themes. The International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES) developed a customization of the original v1 Shortlist app to present information about fish stocks that shows that sort of approach: ICES Popular Advice (Note that is an older app and some of the hyperlinks out to PDF files no longer work).
Most Story Map use for this sort of inventory presents them as guides you step or browse through, like this Native Trees of the Pacific Northwest example, which uses Story Map Journal:
https://www.arcgis.com/apps/MapJournal/index.html?appid=d3295191730a49f691379d7962b20bb0
If you used a different non-Story Map app to present your species data, you could embed that app in a Story Map, like Story Map Series, to combine it with other narrative and media.
There are actually quite a few stories in the Story Maps Gallery related to fish!!
https://storymaps.arcgis.com/en/gallery/#s=0&q=fish&md=storymaps-author:community-story-maps
Rupert