Endangered
Higgins' eye pearly mussel
Lampsilis higginsii
Higgins' eye pearly mussel is a bivalve in the family Unionidae (order Unionida) — Lampsilis higginsii, recorded as Endangered.
Appearance
It is oval in shape with a thick, heavy shell that is yellowish or brown, sometimes with greenish rays. The nacre is white, sometimes tinged pink and partly iridescent.
It reaches up to 10.2 centimeters in length (between 4-5 inches).
Range and habitat
It is endemic to the United States, where it occurs in the upper Mississippi River and the drainages of some of its tributaries.
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
It is threatened by the introduced zebra mussel (Dreissena polymorpha). Higgins' eye pearly mussel is a federally listed endangered species. It has always been rare, but it experienced a large reduction in population after 1965, when it began to lose the northernmost and southernmost reaches of its distribution, a total of over 50% of its range.
One cause of the drop in population was pollution. Overfishing may have reduced the population, as well.
CITES lists this taxon on Appendix I. Confirm the current appendix on the CITES checklist.
Higgins' eye pearly mussel is 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 Higgins' eye pearly mussel, Wikidata item Q3014997. 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.
