Field Guide

The St. Francis River crayfish is rather small and dark brown, with blackish blotches or specks over the upper surfaces of the pincers, carapace, and abdomen. It is limited to the St. Francis River and its tributaries.

Shufeldt’s dwarf crayfish is small, reddish brown to gray, with a paired series of dark, wavy stripes or dashes along the dorsal surface. In Missouri, it occurs in our southeastern lowlands and north along the Mississippi River floodplain.

The Cajun dwarf crayfish is small, reddish brown to gray, with a paired series of dark, wavy stripes or dashes along the dorsal surface. In Missouri, it occurs in our southeastern lowlands.

Everyone knows about terrestrial sowbugs and pillbugs, but many isopod species are aquatic. Missouri has several isopods that live in streams, ponds, rivers, and caves.

Gilled snails are one of two main groups of aquatic snails in Missouri (the other group is the "lunged" snails). Gilled snails, or prosobranchs, breathe with gills and possess a hard trapdoor-like operculum. They are most common in the Ozarks.

Pulmonate, or lunged snails breathe via a lunglike pulmonary cavity, and they lack the hard trapdoor-like operculum found in gilled snails. Except for in the Ozarks, pulmonate snails predominate in most of the aquatic regions in our state.

Ramshorn snails are easy to identify at a glance, because the shell is a flat, disklike coil. Like other pulmonate aquatic snails, they lack the hard horny “trapdoor” possessed by other types of aquatic snails.