Field Guide

Shaped like a checkered gunstock, with its unique, turned-down edge, pistolgrips are easy to identify.

The plain pocketbook is one of the most common and widespread mussels in our state. It is oval, relatively large, and occurs frequently.

Among all the mussels of Missouri, this is perhaps the easiest to recognize: As the shell grows, large knobs are produced, first on one shell and then on the other, in an alternating pattern.

Sometimes called the blue-point, this mussel species is widely distributed in Missouri rivers and is occasionally found along reservoir margins.

A widespread mussel that releases its larvae in tiny red packages to attract fish hosts.

This favored habitat of this vulnerable species is large streams or rivers in firm sand and mud. The bumps on the shell may help to anchor it in the river bottom.

This endangered native mussel lives in flowing waters of large streams among gravel and cobble.

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.