Critically Endangered
White warty-back pearly mussel
Plethobasus cicatricosus
White warty-back pearly mussel is a bivalve in the family Unionidae (order Unionida) — Plethobasus cicatricosus, recorded as Critically Endangered.
Appearance
White warty-back pearly mussel, the white warty-back pearly mussel or white wartyback, is a freshwater mussel in the family Unionidae, the river mussels. This mussel is yellow-green or yellow-brown in color. The nacre is white and partly iridescent.
Range and habitat
Once widely distributed in the Ohio, Cumberland, and Tennessee River systems in the United States, its range has declined dramatically to the point of near-extinction. The white wartyback lived in the main arteries of big rivers. It was distributed through Alabama, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Ohio, Tennessee, and West Virginia.
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 has now been extirpated from all of these states except for Tennessee and Alabama, where it possibly remains in the main flow of the Tennessee River. Even so, no live individuals have been documented since 1997. If a viable population is discovered, plans exist for the white wartyback to be reintroduced to the French Broad River and the Holston River in Tennessee.
There are currently no live individuals that exist in laboratories or propagation facilities.
CITES lists this taxon on Appendix I. Confirm the current appendix on the CITES checklist.
White warty-back pearly mussel 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 White warty-back pearly mussel, Wikidata item Q1054578. 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.
