Critically Endangered
Dromus dromas
Dromus dromas
Dromus dromas is a bivalve in the family Unionidae (order Unionida), recorded as Critically Endangered.
Appearance
This mussel is yellow-green in color with interrupted green rays on the shell. The nacre is white, pink, or reddish. The species got its name from the distinctive hump on the shell of larger individuals.
Range and habitat
This aquatic bivalve mollusk is native to the Cumberland and Tennessee River systems in the United States, where it has experienced a large population decline. This species was historically one of the most common mussels in the Tennessee and Cumberland rivers. In 1978, even so, only three living specimens could be found during a Tennessee River survey, all from the Chickamauga Reservoir.
Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.
Breeding
Freshwater mussels bury in the bed and live for decades if the river still runs and the host fish still spawn.
In crisis
Similarly, two live individuals were found in a Cumberland River survey in 1976, with another individual located in a commercial mussel fisherman's boat, while dead specimens were found at a rock-quarry clammer's camp. Today, the species has been reduced to no more than four populations (two of that are experimental and non-essential). It has been extirpated from the wild in the state of Alabama, but it has been reintroduced there (experimental population).
The only remaining reproducing populations occur in the Clinch and Powell Rivers. Reproducing populations remain in under 10% of the mussel's historical range, and the populations are disjunct.
CITES lists this taxon on Appendix I. Confirm the current appendix on the CITES checklist.
Dromus dromas is Critically Endangered on this catalog because that is the IUCN category stored on Wikidata. Confirm the official criteria and any later count on iucnredlist.org.
Sources
Written for this catalog from the English Wikipedia article on Dromus dromas, Wikidata item Q307710. Family and order context is original field-guide writing about the group, not a copied assessment of this one species. Wikipedia text is CC BY-SA. Not an IUCN assessment. Counts, when quoted, can change — confirm them on the recovery programme and on iucnredlist.org.
