Purple bean

The bivalve

Purple bean is a bivalve in the family Unionidae (order Unionida) — Villosa perpurpurea.

Range and habitat

Purple bean, the purple bean, is a freshwater mussel, an aquatic bivalve mollusk in the family Unionidae, the river mussels. This species is endemic to the United States. Its natural habitat is rivers.

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 habitat loss. There is no exact number for population but it is estimated to be in the hundreds with the largest population found in the upper Clinch River and Indian Creek. A current threat to the purple bean is a change in turbidity, increased suspended solids, and pesticides.

Purple bean 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 Purple bean, Wikidata item Q3014079. 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.