The peculiar pleurocerids of the Interior Highlands II: Pleurocera simplex ozarkensis

There is no substitute for field experience.  You can relentlessly track the modern scientific literature of malacology, pore through the historic monographs, paw through the national collections, dissect those snails, measure ‘em, drag their proteins through a gel or sequence every nucleotide in their genome.  All those are just scattered pieces in a puzzle that will not come together until you wade knee-deep into the river and look down at a population of the living organisms in their natural environment.  And again, in the creek upstream.  And again, in the lake downstream.  And repeat, next drainage over.  You cannot know them, until you walk with them.

So, on August 31, 2025, I loaded my pickup and set off on a two-week field trip to the Interior Highlands.  My plan was to zigzag south from Jefferson City through the Missouri Ozarks, west across the top of Arkansas into eastern Oklahoma, then cut a giant S-shaped curve back across central Arkansas to cover the Arkansas and Ouachita drainages in one swell foop.  The weather was lovely, the water was low, I met a lot of nice people along the way [1], and had a wonderful adventure.

Christopher Rogers at the Little Lee River, OK.

And the rivers into which I waded those two weeks were strange unto my eyes.  Quite in contrast with the lotic environments of the southern, eastern, and midwestern United States of my long experience, typical streambeds in the Interior Highlands are composed of white, baseball-sized cobble.  And at low water, such as I found in early September of last year, I often found myself stomping dryshod across 40 yards of cobble to reach a two-inch trickle.

But when the rains come, Heaven help the hindmost!  Way back in the woods through which I had stomped to reach all those dry riverbeds was everywhere evidence of the floods of May 2025, tangles of storm-washed brush still wrapped around tree limbs 10 feet above my head.  The lotic environments of the Interior Highlands are, in one word, flashy.  In two words, very flashy.  They are a hybrid of an eastern river, and a western dry wash.

And my goodness, Pleurocera potosiensis populations where omnipresent in every river, stream, and mean little trickle I visited my first few days out, sampling south through the Ozarks.  I was heading toward a cluster of four sites that Russ Minton and his colleagues [2] had sampled for their 2017 study of 16S mtDNA sequence divergence in P. potosiensis, which they designated M6, M7, M8, and M10.

Last month we reviewed Minton’s 2017 study in considerable detail, reproducing his Figure 1 map of study sites across the Ozark Highlands of three states.  At left is an enlargement of the little red dashed-line box I drew at the top of last month’s three-state map.  Minton sequenced a total of nine snails from the four populations inhabiting the little rectangle of the Missouri Ozarks have I extracted here, demonstrating two very different haplotypes, five of the typical haplotype (“X”) and four of a second haplotype (about 8% different) that I called Z.  And the middle 40% of Minton’s big gene tree, highlighting those nine haplotypes, is extracted and reproduced below.

So, coming down from the north, I arrived first at Minton’s M10, Clifty Spring.  And the environment didn’t strike me as any different from typical for an Ozark Highland stream – A wide bed of dry white cobble with a trickle of water running through.  I found the spring itself to be a more like a side-pool, a colder pool of clear water at the edge of the stream bed.  And its snail population no different from that of any other Pleurocera potosiensis I had seen in previous days.  Both of the snails Minton had sequenced from that spring in 2017 demonstrated the X haplotype.

It was at Minton’s site M6, as I came near Damascus, that suddenly there shined ‘round about me a light from heaven, and I fell to the earth, and heard a voice saying unto me, “You ain’t in the Ozarks anymore.”  The little stream running under Missouri Road C at site M6 is called Tick Creek on USGS maps, although in Minton’s paper it is referred to as “Trek Creek.”  It was ice cold, crystal clear, bank-full and stable.  And it was rich, and it was productive!

Detail from Minton et al. [2] Fig. 4

The date was September 4, 2025.  And for four days I had been stomping through dreadfully unproductive streams - 90% plain bare dry rock, and 10% plain bare wet rock.  I found nothing green – no moss, no macrophyte, no algae, not even any visible periphyton.  Indeed, I found very little silt, and almost no mud.  Approximately zero visible organic matter of any sort. After four days of this, I had become numb to it.

And suddenly, in tiny little Tick Creek under tiny little Missouri Road C, I had stumbled upon such a lovely, productive, stable little stream that it transported me spiritually out of the dusty Ozarks and back home to the green, rolling hills of Old Virginny.

And my eyes were opened.  And behold, the pleurocerid snails grazing therein were not Pleurocera potosiensis of the Interior Highlands.  They were Pleurocera simplex of the Southern Appalachians.  The shells were not strikingly different.  They seemed to have somewhat larger body whorls relative to expectation for potosiensis, and were entirely missing that strong peripheral keel one often sees in potosiensis, especially on the juvenile shell.

The most striking feature of the Tick Creek population was the black body color, which one never sees in potosiensis.  Black body is a signal feature of P. simplex populations in smaller eastern streams of my long experience.  Pleurocera simplex populations tend to lose that distinctive body coloration in larger streams, and indeed, the subspecies P. simplex ebenum of Cumberland drainages is typically brown/orange of body.  But if you see black in East Tennessee, it’s simplex.

So, referring back to Minton’s map and gene tree. The genetic contrast between the population of snails inhabiting typical Ozark stream M10 and those inhabiting rich, productive stream M6 was as stark as the environmental difference.  All three of the snails sequenced from Tick Creek M6 [3] demonstrated haplotype Z.

The peculiar pleurocerids of Tick Creek (M6).

Driving further south I next arrived at Minton’s site M7, the Missouri Road T bridge over Little Piney Creek.  And there I found another very typical-looking population of P. potosiensis, inhabiting another very typical-looking Ozarkian stream of bare white cobble, like Site M10.  And just as at Site M10, both of the snails Minton had sequenced from site M7 demonstrated haplotype X.

The confirmation I needed for my hypothesis I found at Minton’s site M8, Mill Creek at the State Recreation Area.  There I discovered a side-spring, marked “flowing well” on USGS topo maps, issuing a gorgeous, productive, ice-cold crystal-clear spring run perhaps 100 m long into Mill Creek.  Standing knee deep in Mill Creek, looking upstream with that spring run to my right, I found a mixture of typical-looking brown-bodied P. potosiensis and black-bodied snails indistinguishable from eastern P. simplex.  And at that site, Minton had sampled two snails, one of which proved to bear haplotype X the other of which proved to bear haplotype Z.

The snails at site M8 clearly do not constitute a single randomly-breeding population, but rather an admixture of two populations demonstrating at least some reproductive isolation.  Those are distinct biological species [4].  One must be Pleurocera potosiensis, and the other must be something else.  My hypothesis is that the brown-bodied pleurocerids in Mill Creek bear haplotype X and are correctly identified as P. potosiensis, and that the black-bodied pleurocerids in the side spring bear haplotype Z and are correctly identified as P. simplex.

Dr. R. Ellsworth Call (1856 – 1917) was born in Brooklyn but spent most of his life in The Heartland, teaching in secondary schools across Illinois, Missouri, Iowa, Kentucky, and Indiana [5].  He is best known to friends of the FWGNA Project for the six-part series of papers he published on the Mollusca of Kansas 1885 – 1887 [6], as well as his 1886 collaboration with Henry Pilsbry to describe the genus Pyrgulopsis [7].

And chief among the many and wondrous contributions R. Ellsworth Call made to American malacology in 1886 was his “Description of a new strepomatid mollusk of the Genus Goniobasis,” published in the Bulletin of the Washburn College Laboratory of Natural History, way out in Topeka [8].  In that paper he described the shell of Goniobasis ozarkensis with a large paragraph of adjectives and adverbs including “globosely elongated, faintly bicarinate, body whorl large, obtusely angulate at the periphery.”  The animal he described as “black above.”  The type locality was “Blue Spring, in the Ozark Mountains, Shannon County, Missouri.”  That’s less than 60 miles south of Minton’s Mill Creek site M8.

Goniobasis ozarkensis Call 1886 [9]

We mentioned last month that Goodrich [10] considered Call’s ozarkensis one of the four subspecies of potosiensis, and as such the nomen was transmitted to the present day by Burch [11].  No, those populations are not a subspecies of potosiensis.  At Minton’s Mill Creek site M8 there is clear evidence of reproductive isolation between a population that matches Call’s 1886 description of ozarkensis and a population of typical P. potosiensis.  Let’s transfer Call’s nomen from subspecific level under potosiensis to subspecific level under simplex: Pleurocera simplex ozarkensis (Call 1886).

As a generality, the shell of Pleurocera potosiensis bears a mid-whorl angulation, much more pronounced in juveniles, typically becoming obsolete in adults.  The shell is usually tan, brown, or golden, sometimes bearing bands of darker color.  The body color is never black.   Populations of P. potosiensis are common in rivers and streams throughout the Interior Highlands.

By contrast, the shell of P. simplex ozarkensis never bears a mid-whorl angulation, although sometimes faint carina are evident.  Both shell and body are darker, sometimes black.  Populations of P. simplex ozarkensis are restricted to richer, more stable springs, streams and rivers of the Interior Highlands with significant groundwater input.

Continuing on my journey with my eyes opened by the Damascus-Road experience of Thursday afternoon, September 4, I was able to recognize nine additional populations of P. simplex ozarkensis in the springs and streams I sampled further south through the Interior Highlands, all the way to Hot Springs, Arkansas [12].  And I found plenty of additional evidence of reproductive isolation.  Indeed, I found another mixed population in the Big Piney River about 30 miles south of Mill Creek M8, where “Boiling Spring” bubbles up right on the river margin, spitting a big population of simplex into a huge population of potosiensis, both populations retaining distinctive features [14].

And ultimately, I arrived in Eastern Oklahoma, to dip my boot toe into Sallisaw Creek, the home of Minton’s population OK, the pleurocerid that had launched my 3,400 mile, 15-day Odyssey.  And there I found the pleurocerid population mixed.  My readership will recall that Minton sequenced three individuals from his population OK, and that all three returned the simplex haplotype Z.  I myself could distinguish both species in Sallisaw Creek, mostly simplex, but a significant fraction of potosiensis.  And I will level with you.  Some of the pleurocerid snails in Sallisaw Creek I could not sort to species, with any degree of certainty.

Pleurocera potosiensis and Pleurocera simplex ozarkensis are effectively a sibling species pair.  Often in my 14 days of wading the creeks and rivers of the Interior Highlands, I reached down and drew back a pleurocerid snail I could not firmly identify one way or the other.  It seems quite likely to me that potosiensis and simplex hybridize.  Heaven knows we’ve amply documented that phenomenon in pleurocerid species more different than this pair [15].

And now, turning a practiced eye back on the ten paratypic shells that R. Ellsworth Call illustrated in his original 1886 description, I think it quite likely that shell #2 and shell #9 are P. potosiensis.  I think the population Call sampled at Blue Spring, Shannon CO, Missouri, may have been mixed [16].

Many independent lines of evidence suggest strongly that Pleurocera simplex, like most of the pleurocerids of Eastern North America, evolved in the Paleozoic Era, with the Appalachian Orogeny.  The hypothesis is inescapable that Pleurocera potosiensis evolved from a population of P. simplex after the Interior Highlands were separated by the Cretaceous embayment.

And were Charles Darwin alive today, I feel sure he would hasten to suggest that natural selection is a very likely cause.  At some point in the last 65 my, some population of P. simplex apparently adapted to a flashy, low-nutrient riverine environment, speciated, and spread downstream throughout the Ozark/Ouachita Highlands, leaving its ancestral P. simplex population, indeed hundreds of ancient P. simplex populations, stuck upstream in the creeks.  Grist for a future post, perhaps?  Stay tuned.

 

Notes:

 

[1] In addition to my friends Randy Sarver and Dave Michelson of the MoDNR, whom I acknowledged last month, special shout-outs here to Christopher Rogers with the Grand River Dam Authority in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, and Kyle Gustafson and his students at Arkansas State University in Jonesboro.

 

[2] Minton, R.L., B.L. McGregor, D.M. Hayes, C. Paight, and K. Inoue (2017) Genetic structuring in the pyramid Elimia, Elimia potosiensis (Gastropoda, Pleuroceridae), with implications for pleurocerid conservation. Zoosystematics and Evolution 93(2) 437-449.

 

[3] Minton uploaded these three identical haplotypes into GenBank as MO6A, MO6B, and MO6C, but they were labeled 6-A, 6-C, and 6-E on his figure 4.  I have retained the A-C-E system here.

 

[4] If the rationale for this statement is not immediately obvious to you, please see:

• What is character phase disequilibrium? [4Jan22]

[5] The biographical details on the life of R. Ellsworth Call are extracted from:

• Johnson, Richard I. (1975) R. Ellsworth Call with a bibliography of his works on mollusks and a catalogue of his taxa.  Occasional Papers on Mollusks (MCZ Harvard) 4 (54): 133 – 144.

[6] There’s a paragraph reviewing Call’s surveys of Kansas in the introduction to the Freshwater Gastropods of the Great Plains [FWGGP].

 

[7] Call R. E. & Pilsbry H. A. (1886). On Pyrgulopsis, a new genus of rissoid mollusk, with description of two new forms. Proceedings Davenport Academy of Natural Sciences 5: 9-14.  For more see:

• The SNHTHICACWB Marstonia 5: scalariformis [4Oct22]

[8] Call, R.E. (1886) Description of a new strepomatid mollusk of the genus Goniobasis.  Bulletin of the Washburn Laboratory of Natural History (Topeka) 1(7): 189 – 190.

 

[9] There is no scale bar on the plate, which almost certainly means that the reproduction was 1:1 in the original.  Call stated that “The average dimensions of the seven largest specimens are, for length 10.77 mm, breadth 6.21 mm.”  You do the math.

 

[10] Goodrich, C. (1939) Pleuroceridae of the Mississippi River basin exclusive of the Ohio River system.  Occasional Papers of the Museum of Zoology, University of Michigan 406: 1 – 4.

 

[11] This is a difficult work to cite.  J. B. Burch's North American Freshwater Snails was published in three different ways.  It was initially commissioned as an identification manual by the US EPA and published by the agency in 1982.  It was also serially published in the journal Walkerana (1980, 1982, 1988) and finally as stand-alone volume in 1989 (Malacological Publications, Hamburg, MI).

 

[12] The population in Crystal Springs, AR, where Minton did his morphometric work [13], is almost certainly P simplex ozarkensis.

 

[13] Minton RL, Lewis EM, Netherland B, Hayes DM (2011) Large differences over small distances: plasticity in the shells of Elimia potosiensis (Gastropoda: Pleuroceridae). International Journal of Biology 3(1): 23 - 32.

 

[14] We used a photo of “Boiling Spring” (Texas County, MO) in the photobar at the top of our brand new “Freshwater Gastropods of Missouri” web resource.  Look at the top of the [FWGMO] front page, if you’re curious.

 

[15] For a review of hybridization in the North American Pleuroceridae, see:

• Widespread hybridization between Pleurocera laqueata and P. troostiana in streams of the Tennessee/Cumberland [15Oct24]
• Reticulate evolution in the North American Pleuroceridae [12Nov24]

[16] And, rats!  Dick Johnson [5] picked shell #2 as the lectotype.  Let’s keep that a secret, just between me and all two of you who read my irritatingly discursive footnotes, okay?

The peculiar pleurocerids of the Interior Highlands I: Pleurocera potosiensis

You all like maps, am I right?  Who among my elite and erudite readership does not, at least occasionally, revel in an old-time paper map, and lament their impending extinction?

 So last summer I was taking a walk down memory lane in Derring Hall, home to both the Biology Department and the Geology Department at my alma mater [1], Virginia Tech (1973 – 1977).  And I stopped to admire a gigantic (1996) Tectonic Map of North America [2], preserved behind floor-to-ceiling Plexiglas sheeting outside the Geology Department office.  And snapped the photo below.

I was stricken by the obvious inference that at some point in the ancient past, a chunk broke off my old familiar East Tennessee stomping grounds and floated west beyond the Mississippi into the wilds of Arkansas and Oklahoma.  That chunk is the Ouachita Mountains.  Indeed, the tectonic theory of North America suggests that the Ouachita Mountains and the Appalachians are “sisters,” created together by the collision of the Gondwanan plates around 300 mya, subsequently separated by the Cretaceous Embayment.

 

Like most of us here in The East, I tend to lump the Ouachita Mountains together in my mind with the Ozark Highlands, but the Ozarks were uplifted as a dome and subsequently dissected.  That rugged region, extending north from NW Arkansas well into Missouri, is not visible in the 1996 map above.  I cannot find any consensus on the date or cause of the Ozark uplift; it may also have been a function of the Paleozoic orogeny that formed Ouachita Mountains, or may have been post-Paleozoic.  That doesn’t matter for the yarn I’m fixin’ to spin.

 

Melania potosiensis [6]

The most important thing is the snails.  Today, the characteristic freshwater gastropod of the USGS Interior Highlands Physiographic Division, which includes the Ozark Highlands, the Ouachita Mountains, and the Arkansas Valley between them, is Pleurocera potosiensis.  That snail is a regional endemic – widespread and locally quite common in rivers and streams throughout the physiographic division, unknown elsewhere.  Shi-Kuei Wu and colleagues [3] documented populations across the entire southern half of Missouri, an observation we have now thoroughly confirmed [FWGMO map].  Christian and Hayes [4] reported P. potosensis populations equally widespread across the northwestern quarter of Arkansas.  The species range also extends westward into Oklahoma, and touches the SE corner of Kansas [FWGGP map].  Further south, populations of P. potosiensis become less common in tributaries of the Arkansas River, and spotty in tributaries of the Ouachita.

Isaac Lea’s brief, Latinate description of Melania potosiensis appeared in 1841 [5], as #46 in that same “litter of 57 pleurocerid puppies” I catalogued in my essay of [20Aug25], with a more complete English description and figure following in 1843 [6].  Tryon [7] transferred the nomen to Goniobasis, reprinting Lea’s 1843 description verbatim, while adding, perceptively, 

“Were it not for the wide differences of locality I should suspect this to be identical with simplex.  I have not seen specimens, but the figure and description are certainly very close to that species.”

Goodrich [8] recognized four subspecies.  The most widespread he identified as Goniobasis potosiensis plebius (Anthony 1850), which he considered common in rivers and creeks throughout the Ozarkian area of Missouri, Arkansas, and Eastern Oklahoma.  The typical subspecies Goniobasis potosiensis (ss) he considered “a shell of the upland streams of a few Missouri counties” only.  Goodrich also recognized a Goniobasis potosiensis crandalli (Pilsbry 1890) “known only from Mammoth Springs, Fulton County, Arkansas” and a Goniobasis potosiensis ozarkensis (Call 1886) which he considered a “depauperate” form [9, 10], “only from springs of Shannon, Carter, Washington, Dent, and Camden counties, Missouri.”  Burch [11] transmitted Goodrich’s entire four-subspecies system along with their ranges verbatim, pausing only to swap out the well-established genus Goniobasis for the zombie taxon [12] Elimia.

 

As a laboratory for the study of evolution, the widely-dispersed and genetically diverse Ozark/Ouachita populations of P. potosiensis may rival the Pleurocera proxima populations of the southern Appalachians [14].  By the Grace of God, they seem to have slipped through 200 years of malacological malpractice to arrive in the 21st century almost unsplit by taxonomic exuberance.  Our colleague Russ Minton and his coworkers took advantage of this happy situation in both a shell morphological study [15] published in 2011, and in a 2017 study of intraspecific genetic divergence [16].

 

The 2011 paper, a landmark-based study of 500 individual shells sampled at 25 m intervals from a spring run and adjacent tributary of the Ouachita River in Garland County, Arkansas, was most memorable for its peculiar Figure 1.  True to the school of landmark-based morphometrics, there was no scale on Minton’s photo, reproduced below.  The caption simply read, “Morphological variation in Elimia potosiensis from Arkansas.”

Minton et al. [15] Figure 1

The first thing that struck me when I read Minton's 2011 paper some years ago was that the second shell (B) was clearly that of Leptoxis arkansensis, not P. potosiensis at all.  I’m sure that’s a common mistake, to naïve eyes.  I myself had no field experience in The Interior Highlands until 2024.  All I knew about the malacofauna of that biogeographically fascinating part of the world until quite recently was what I had learned from a week studying the Wu-Oesch-Gordon Missouri collections at the University of Colorado Museum in 2021, and even there I found some not-insubstantial Leptoxis/Pleurocera confusion.

But what really struck me upon my first reading of Minton’s 2011 morphometric study was that third shell (C).  It was clearly out of scale with the other two – probably 30% magnified, by my eye.  And recalling the words of Tryon, I found that shell completely indistinguishable from my old friend from the East, Pleurocera simplex. 

 

I picked up my first Pleurocera simplex when I was a student at Virginia Tech back in 1975, and since then have sampled hundreds of populations from SW Virginia all across Tennessee, Kentucky, and north Alabama.  I have published five papers and notes on P. simplex thus far [17], supplemented by at least eight blog posts.  Rob Dillon knows Pleurocera simplex.  Were populations of P. simplex on that plate-tectonic raft when it broke loose from its Tennessee moorings and washed up on the banks of the Wide Missouri way back in the Paleozoic?

 

Russ Minton’s 2017 paper was an even more interesting read.  He and his colleagues reported the results of two separate studies, a fine-scale study using ISSR markers very similar to the allozyme study I published on P. proxima way back in 1988 [14], and a study of 16S sequence divergence at the scale of many of the allozyme studies I published on P. proxima and others in the early-2000s [18].  The fine-scale study was poorly designed, with only 10 snails sampled for each of 12 sites down approximately 500 meters of stream, such that the ISSR markers (110 unique genotypes among the 120 individuals) returned no results.  But the study of mtDNA sequence divergence was fascinating.

Adapted from Figure 1 of Minton et al [16]

Minton and colleagues sequenced the 16S gene from 61 individual snails identified as “Elimia potosiensis” from 16 sites in southern Missouri, 14 sites in northern Arkansas, and 1 site in eastern Oklahoma.  Their map of sample sites, color-coded by drainage system, is reproduced above. This is the second-best data set [19] on interpopulation mtDNA sequence divergence ever published for any nominal species of pleurocerid snail.

 

Minton discovered four strikingly different sets of sequences, each about 10% different from the other three, none of which demonstrated any correlation to geography whatsoever.  Minton’s Figure 4 is reproduced below.  I have labelled those four sets of haplotypes X, Y, Z, and L.

 

Who among my loyal readership finds this result surprising, in the least?  How many blog posts have I dedicated to the phenomenon of mitochondrial superheterogeneity in freshwater gastropods [20], since Bob Frankis and I first stumbled upon the phenomenon [21] back in 2004?  Speaking now to any new visitors we might be entertaining in the columns of the FWGNA Blog this month, and to any other readers who might otherwise imagine that double-digit mitochondrial sequence diversity is unusual within pleurocerid populations, you are earnestly invited to footnote [22] for approximately 30 minutes of remedial study. 

Adapted from
Minton [16] Fig. 4

Ah, but.  Some of the details in Minton’s Figure 4 did not match the expectation I have developed over years of familiarity with mtSH.  Yes, Minton identified a majority haplotype, which I have labelled X, just as Whelan and Strong found in the best study of mtSH to date, their 2016 paper on Alabama Leptoxis [19].  Whelan & Strong also discovered five other haplotypes, all demonstrating double-digit sequence divergence from the majority haplotype, four of which were quite rare.  My jetlagged wildebison model would suggest that those five rare Leptoxis haplotypes had evolved somewhere far away (in snail-space or snail-time) to be scattered into the present-day study area by dirty birds.  And in the case of the Whelan & Strong dataset, we cannot identify four of those other five places.  Fine.

And yes in fact, the cluster I have labelled Y in Minton’s Figure 4 does fit our expectation for mtSH, under the jetlagged wildebison model.  That haplotype is 10.1% different from haplotype X, it is rare, and there is no divergence among the five individuals (found in three populations) carrying it.

 

But the clusters labelled Z and L in Minton’s Figure 4 do not look like mitochondrial superheterogeneity to me.  They are not rare.  Moreover, both show evolutionary structure – a branching within cluster.  Within cluster Z, for example, Population #2 branches first – the only two individuals sampled for the study, together.  Then population OK (from Oklahoma) branches off – all three of the individuals sampled, together.

 

And as I sat at my desk late one evening several years ago, examining the population OK data published in that paper, a bell tinkled way in the back of my addled brain.

 

Russ Minton only figured one shell in his 2017 paper, pasted into the corner of his Figure 2, showing a map of the sample sites for his ISSR study.  Quoting his Figure 2 caption: “Shell of E. potosiensis from population OK is shown.”  I have clipped that shell from Russ’ 2017 Figure 2 and pasted it in the lower left corner of my adaptation of his Figure 1 map above.  That is very clearly the same scaleless individual shell he labelled “Elimia potosiensis from Arkansas” in his 2011 paper.  And that shell looked as much like Pleurocera simplex in 2017 as it did in 2011.

 

All three of the individual snails that Minton sequenced from Oklahoma carried haplotype Z.  And the other 13 individuals carrying haplotype Z were scattered all across Minton’s three-state study area, as I have marked in red above.  In what direction could all those clues be leading?  Tune in next time.

 

Notes:

 

[1] For sweet, gauzy memories from my halcyon days at dear old Virginia Tech, see:

• Water hardness, stream size, and A.E. Boycott: A New River Reminiscence. [8July25]

[2] Muehlberger, W.R. (1996) Tectonic Map of North America.  American Association of Petroleum Geologists, Tulsa, OK.

 

[3] Wu, S-K., Oesch, R. & Gordon, M. (1997) Missouri Aquatic Snails. Jefferson City: Missouri Department of Conservation. 97 pp.

 

[4] Christian, A. D. and D. M. Hayes (2007) Diversity and distribution of freshwater gastropods from the Ozark Region of Arkansas.  Arkansas Game & Fish Commission, unpublished report. 34 pp.

 

[5] Lea, Isaac (1841) Continuation of Mr. Lea's paper on New Fresh Water and Land Shells.  Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 2: 11 – 15.

 

[6] Lea, Isaac (1843) Description of New Fresh Water and Land Shells.  Transactions of the American Philosophical Society (New Series) 8: 163 – 250.

 

[7] Tryon, G. W. (1873) Land and Freshwater shells of North America Part IV, Strepomatidae.  Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections 253: 1 - 435.

 

[8] Goodrich, C. (1939) Pleuroceridae of the Mississippi River basin exclusive of the Ohio River system.  Occasional Papers of the Museum of Zoology, University of Michigan 406: 1 – 4.

 

[9] We first mentioned “depauperization” in our essay of [20Aug25] on Melania acutocarinata.  Goodrich [10] defined “depauperization” as “the outward manifestation of disease, accident or malnutrition or a reaction to inimical environment.”

 

[10] Goodrich, Calvin (1939) Aspects of depauperization.  The Nautilus 52: 124 – 128.

 

[11] This is a difficult work to cite.  J. B. Burch's North American Freshwater Snails was published in three different ways.  It was initially commissioned as an identification manual by the US EPA and published by the agency in 1982.  It was also serially published in the journal Walkerana (1980, 1982, 1988) and finally as stand-alone volume in 1989 (Malacological Publications, Hamburg, MI).

 

[12] We reviewed the taxonomic controversy here:

• Goniobasis and Elimia [28Sept04]

It ultimately didn’t matter, because both Goniobasis and Elimia were synonymized under Pleurocera by Dillon [13] in 2011.

 

[13] Dillon, R. T., Jr. (2011) Robust shell phenotype is a local response to stream size in the genus Pleurocera (Rafinesque, 1818). Malacologia 53: 265-277. [pdf]  For a review, see:

• Goodbye Goniobasis, Farewell Elimia [23Mar11]

[14] General references on the population genetics of P. proxima:

Dillon, R.T. and G.M. Davis (1980) The Goniobasis of southern Virginia and northwestern North Carolina: Genetic and shell morphometric relationships. Malacologia 20: 83-98. [pdf]

Dillon, R.T. (1984) Geographic distance, environmental difference, and divergence between isolated populations. Systematic Zoology 33:69-82. [pdf]

Dillon, R.T. (1988) Evolution from transplants between genetically distinct populations of freshwater snails. Genetica 76: 111-119. [pdf]

Dillon, R.T. (1988) The influence of minor human disturbance on biochemical variation in a population of freshwater snails. Biological Conservation 43: 137-144. [pdf] For a review, see:

• Intrapopulation gene flow: The polymorphic Pleurocera of Naked Creek [12Oct21]

[15] Minton R.L., Lewis E.M., Netherland B, Hayes D.M. (2011) Large differences over small distances: plasticity in the shells of Elimia potosiensis (Gastropoda: Pleuroceridae). International Journal of Biology 3(1): 23 - 32.

 

[16] Minton, R.L., B.L. McGregor, D.M. Hayes, C. Paight, and K. Inoue (2017) Genetic structuring in the pyramid Elimia, Elimia potosiensis (Gastropoda, Pleuroceridae), with implications for pleurocerid conservation. Zoosystematics and Evolution 93(2) 437-449.

 

[17] General references on the population genetics of P. simplex in the Southern Appalachians:

Dillon, R. T., Jr., & G. M. Davis (1980) The Goniobasis of southern Virginia and northwestern North Carolina: Genetic and shell morphometric relationships. Malacologia 20: 83-98. [pdf]

Dillon, R. T., Jr., & J. D. Robinson (2007) The Goniobasis ("Elimia") of southwest Virginia, I. Population genetic survey. Report to the Virginia Division of Game & Inland Fisheries, 25 pp. [pdf]

Dillon, R. T., Jr. (2016a) Two reproductively isolated populations cryptic under Pleurocera simplex (Say, 1825) inhabiting Pistol Creek in Maryville, Tennessee. Ellipsaria 18(2): 15-16. [pdf]

Dillon, R. T., Jr. & J. D. Robinson (2016) The identity of the "fat simplex" population inhabiting Pistol Creek in Maryville, Tennessee. Ellipsaria 18(2): 16-18. [pdf]

Dillon, R. T., Jr. (2016) Match of Pleurocera gabbiana (Lea, 1862) to populations cryptic under P. simplex (Say, 1825) Ellipsaria 18(3): 10 - 12. [pdf]

 

[18] Regional surveys of pleurocerid population genetics:

Dillon, R. T. and A. J. Reed (2002) A survey of genetic variation at allozyme loci among Goniobasis populations inhabiting Atlantic drainages of the Carolinas.  Malacologia 44: 23-31. [pdf]

Dillon, R T. and J. D. Robinson (2009) The snails the dinosaurs saw: Are the pleurocerid populations of the Older Appalachians a relict of the Paleozoic Era?  Journal of the North American Benthological Society 28: 1 - 11.  (Rosemary Mackay Award)  [pdf]

Dillon, R. T. and J. D. Robinson (2011) The opposite of speciation: Population genetics of Pleurocera (Gastropoda: Pleuroceridae) in central Georgia.  American Malacological Bulletin  29: 159-168.  [pdf]

 

[19] The blue ribbon goes to the data set of Whelan, N.V. & E. E. Strong (2016) Morphology, molecules and taxonomy: extreme incongruence in pleurocerids (Gastropoda, Cerithiodea, Pleuroceridae). Zoologica Scripta 45: 62 – 87.

 

[20] A search on the word “superheterogeneity” using the box in the upper right of your screen will return hits in an impressive 24 essays.  And that doesn’t even include the essays I posted on the subject before I coined the term “mitochondrial superheterogeneity” in 2016.

 

[21] Dillon, R. T., and R. C. Frankis. (2004) High levels of DNA sequence divergence in isolated populations of the freshwater snail, Goniobasis.  American Malacological Bulletin 19: 69 - 77. [pdf]

 

[22] Mitochondrial superheterogeneity (mtSH), where two or more of the members of a single population demonstrate greater than 10% divergence in any single-copy mtDNA gene, not sex linked, is remarkably common in freshwater gastropods.  In pulmonate populations, I wouldn’t be surprised if most or all mtSH is ultimately traceable to cytoplasmic male sterility [23].  In prosobranch populations, however, I think mtSH is a signature of great age, plus low-frequency long distance dispersal, the “Jetlagged Wildebison Model.”  Here is a sample of my previous posts on mtSH:

• The Snails the Dinosaurs Saw [16Mar09]
• Mitochondrial superheterogeneity: What we know [15Mar16]
• Mitochondrial superheterogeneity: What it means [6Apr16]
• Mitochondrial superheterogeneity and speciation [3May16]
• Mitochondrial heterogeneity in Marstonia lustrica [3Aug20]
• Testing the periwinkle hypothesis [9May23]

[23] David, Patrice, Cyril Degletagne, Nathanaëlle Saclier, Aurel Jennan, Philippe Jarne, Sandrine Plénet, Lara Konecny, Clémentine François, Laurent Guéguen, Noéline Garcia, Tristan Lefébure, Emilien Luquet (2022) Extreme mitochondrial DNA divergence underlies genetic conflict over sex determination.  Current Biology 32: 2325 - 2333.  https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2022.04.014.  For a review, see:

• Cytoplasmic Male Sterility in Physa! [9June22]

The Freshwater Gastropods of Missouri

The FWGNA Project is pleased to announce that a ninth region has been added to our burgeoning portfolio of online resources: The Freshwater Gastropods of Missouri, by R.T. Dillon, Martin Kohl, and Bruce Stephen.  Our coverage now extends across all or part of 23 states, from the Atlantic drainages onward into The Great Plains.

And just for fun, try entering the FWGMO site from our easy-to-use front page, freshly enhanced by our new friend Greg Nemes of Tanager Creative with a fancy clickable map, here:

FWGNA

Our survey of approximately 788 springs, streams, rivers, swamps, ponds and reservoirs across the Show-Me State yielded 1,760 records of 44 species and subspecies, eight of which are new to the FWGNA Project [1]. Fresh species pages for each of these eight brings our total coverage up to 156.  Two of the pleurocerid subspecies are new combinations, more about which in coming months.  Our database, as usual, is freely available for the asking.

The major drainage basins of Missouri, showing 788 sample sites.

We have stood on the shoulders of giants.  The giant of whom we must make special mention here is Dr. Shi-Kuei Wu, who along with Ronald Oesch and Mark Gordon published the wonderful 97-page, staple-bound report, Missouri Aquatic Snails, in 1997 [2].  We spent a very productive week working in Shi-Kui’s carefully-curated collection at the University of Colorado Museum back in 2021, ultimately yielding 1,261 (70%) of the records transmitted here.  Our new FWGMO web resource is dedicated to him.  We also owe special debts of gratitude to Leanne Elder and Hsiu-Ping Liu for hosting us graciously in the collection and in the home, respectively.

And speaking of gracious hosts.  Our colleagues Randy Sarver and Dave Michaelson were most generous with time, talent, and seven-year-old blacktop vials of macrobenthos at the Missouri Department of Natural Resources in Jefferson City [3].  Sorting through those vials, and the meticulous records that came with them, yielded another 325 (18%) of the records in the FWGMO database.

Ste. Genevieve-Modoc Ferry at low water

The remainder of our records were personally-collected by the three of us. The vastly-trapezoidal patch of the world enclosed by the boundaries of Missouri in 1821 is flat-out gorgeous, not all over but in spots, and I for one greatly enjoyed wetting a boot toe in her sparkling waters.  We concentrated our efforts on undersampled regions and habitats, especially the main Mississippi and Missouri Rivers, which we collected at historic low waters in September of 2023.

I have cousins in St. Louis and in Moberly, about an hour north of Jeff City, and had it explained to me that Missouri is not one state but two, “Mi-zoor-ree” in the northern flatlands and “Muh-zoor-rah” in the Ozark highlands of the south.  A biogeographer might point out that the Mississippi lowlands of the bootheel region could be considered a third state, at minimum.  The freshwater gastropod fauna reflects those striking physiographic, cultural, and military [4] distinctions.  See the FWGMO Discussion [link] for an elaboration.

We have also updated our Synthesis of relative abundances across the entire 127 species, 23-state fauna covered by the FWGNA project to the present date.  This new “Version 3.2” [link] has been a long time coming.  Since our previous Synthesis v3.1 (12May22), we have added the Great Plains (1,482 records) and the Gulf drainages of Georgia (650 records) as well as the 1,760 records newly collected from Missouri, for a grand total of 25,468.  The present update has (of course) resulted in an adjustment of the incidence rankings over the entire 127 species set, the less common half of the distribution, in any case.

The Gasconade River, Osage Co.

And finally.  We gratefully acknowledge and sincerely thank Mr. Greg Nemes of Tanager Creative for his skillful enhancement of the entire FWGNA site.  In addition to the keen clickable map on the front page, Greg did a tremendous job re-wiring the site to facilitate routine maintenance and update, freshening up the fonts, adding cool new analytics and hooking up an email platform with subscription boxes at the bottom of every page, to name but a few improvements.  So, remember the little red bird with the great big bag of skills, tanager.org, when clear communication matters to your nature, science, or humanities nonprofit!

Notes:

[1] The eight new species and subspecies freshly added: Amnicola stygia, Antrobia culveri, Fontigens aldrichi, F. antroecetes, F. proserpina, Leptoxis arkansensis, Pleurocera simplex ozarkensis, P. canaliculata lawrencii.

[2] Wu, S-K., Oesch, R. & Gordon, M. (1997) Missouri Aquatic Snails. Missouri Department of Conservation, Natural History Series #5. 97 pp.

[3] We posted a photo of our handsome colleagues from the Missouri DNR late last year:

• Art, science, and public policy: A dialogue in three languages [10Dec25]

[4] Infantry representing the northern half of Mi-zoor-ree shot south with rifled muskets; Muh-zoor-rah State Guard returned fire with obsolete smoothbores.

The ICE Detention Center and the Snail

OK, listen up!  It seems likely to me that the title of this month’s essay may attract more than the usual trickle of casual surfers and random googlers to this arcane little crack in the internet.  You new visitors and guests will not find anything newsworthy in the paragraphs that follow, nor any information relevant to any ongoing controversy, nor anything interesting, entertaining, nor probably even intelligible.  And absolutely no politics!  This is a blog post written by a snail scientist, for snail scientists.  Everybody else, please go away.  You’re scaring us.

Now for my colleagues still remaining, all six of you all.  Here is the background.  In the late morning of Wednesday 1Apr26 [1] I missed two phone calls but did successfully receive a voicemail and a follow-up email from one Ms. Maddi O’Neill with the subject line, “Media request on deadline.”  In her email, Ms. O’Neill identified herself as a freelance journalist based in Baltimore. And here, verbatim, is the background she supplied, which is really all I know about the political controversy to this day:

“I'm working on a story about a proposed ICE detention center in Washington County, Maryland, and the state of Maryland's effort to block its construction through litigation. Maryland's lawsuit hinges on the need for an Environmental Impact Statement, which the feds have not completed, and points to possible harms to state-endangered species and species in need of conservation that live near the proposed detention center site. Specifically, the state references [2] … the Appalachian springsnail, and I was wondering if you'd be open to speaking with me for a story.”

A quick google search on my part reminded me [3] that the “Appalachian springsnail” is Fontigens bottimeri.  For background on the biology of that obscure little black speck of a gastropod see the FWGNA [species page], and for contextualization see my essays of [9Aug22] and [12Feb26].

At the Hopewell Road entrance.

So I returned Ms. O’Neill’s phone call right away, and we arranged a convenient time for a telephone interview a couple days later, Friday morning 3Apr26.  In the interim, I did a bit of homework – googling up more info on the proposed ICE Detention Center, located on a 54-acre site in the crotch of I-81 and I-70, just north of Williamsport. 

I initially labored under the false impression that the feds were proposing to construct a new facility.  But in fact, their proposal was to repurpose an 800,000 square foot warehouse already on that site, newly constructed (on speculation? really?) but never used [7].  The monstrosity was large enough to have two addresses: 10900 Hopewell Road and 16220 Wright Road.

And digging through the FWGNA database, I found a Fontigens bottimeri record in the Smithsonian (USNM-874706) collected by one D. Feller in 1991 from “Kemps Spring No. 4,” the lat/long coordinates of which (39.6136, -77.8136) mapped just a half mile East of 16220 Wright Road.  I also took the opportunity to email my buddy Matt Ashton at the Maryland DNR for his input but received no response [8].

I really enjoyed getting to know Ms. Maddi O’Neill, however, in our roughly 30-minute telephone conversation Friday.  It turned out that she herself was planning a field trip to hunt Fontigens in the waters around the proposed detention center.  I like that sort of positive mental attitude.  I did my best to help her over the phone, emphasizing that Fontigens populations are restricted [9] to springs and spring runs – cold, clear, pristine 100% groundwater.

And I was pleased to receive a couple follow-up texts from Ms. O’Neill Sunday afternoon 12Apr26, apparently in the field, asking for the lat/long coordinates of Kemps Spring #4, and following with several photos of individual Lymnaea humilis perched on her finger. Bless her heart!

So on 27Apr26 she texted me a link to her article, newly published in an online magazine called “Slate,” [html].  I found the article behind a paywall.  But I was so curious to read it that I ponied up the dough for a three-month subscription, so I could copy-and-paste the text into a [pdf] document, here:

An Ingenious New Strategy for Blocking ICE Detention Warehouses Depends on a Minuscule Snail, by Madeleine O’Neill.

Spoiler alert!  Our friend Maddi did not find any Fontigens bottimeri.  But by that point I had already made plans to drive up I-81 to Williamsport and do the survey right.

I laid out a sampling scheme with five sites down Semple Run (A, B, C, D, F), the little stream just beneath the gigantic warehouse at 16220 Wright Road.  I had also noticed, using the yellow man on Google street view, what looked like an old springhouse by Wright Road not 100 yards down the hill from 16220 (E). And of course, I dropped a pin (G) on 39.6136, -77.8136.  At which coordinates I could find no evidence of a spring on any map available to me.  Satellite imagery seemed to suggest that point was in somebody’s back yard.

So the bright sunny morning of Tuesday, 5May26, found me touring around the besieged little valley of Semple Run.  And the first entry into my field notebook was this: “Semple Run low and clear over silt and debris. 150 years a ditch through ag fields, a ditch under the interstate thereafter.”

Marl falls at Site (D).

From the topo maps, it had seemed possible to me that Semple Run might bear a lot higher proportion of groundwater than it actually carries here in the 21st Century.  The current picked up speed downstream, over a cobble bottom, with some marl.  But alas, at no point was the environment fit for Fontigens, headwaters to mouth [10].  I found patchy populations of the usual Physa (both acuta and gyrina) and Maddi’s Lymnaea (Galba) humilis in the five sample sites I had marked down its length, and (quite unexpectedly) a couple individual Helisoma trivolvis, doing the anceps job. No limpets.  Period.

And perhaps unsurprisingly, the Wright Road springhouse (E) was bone dry, alas again.  The ground was boggy below the springhouse, on the other side of Wright Road, no habitat for Fontigens in evidence.

Springhouse at Site (E).

And what of Kemps Spring #4?  I parked at the south end of Celeste Drive, walked over the railroad tracks, and knocked on the door of the lovely circa 1820 brick farmhouse at 39.6136, -77.8136, repeatedly.  And a dog inside barked loud enough to wake the dead.  And nobody came to the door.  So, I let myself through the gate into the back yard and toured around, finding no evidence of spring nor springhouse.

Ultimately a nice lady, in her dishabille (as my mother used to say) came out to greet me [11].  She confirmed that no spring exists on her property, nor has any spring ever existed in that neighborhood to her knowledge, although she was familiar with the dry springhouse at Wright Road, on the other side of the tracks.  It seems likely to me that the dry springhouse at site (E) was indeed built over Kemps Spring #4, with an error of 0.0012 degrees latitude and 0.0070 degrees longitude.

Big farmhouse at Site (G).

“Lovely farmland spoiled.”  That’s the last note in my field book for the morning of May 5, 2026.  And back at the truck, as I shucked off my boots, it occurred to me that same observation would apply equally to the country around my own hometown of Waynesboro [12], two hours south, in the same sprawl that has enveloped the country around Williamsport.  And indeed, sadly, the Great Valley of Virginia.  And as one of my favorite philosophers once observed, “If this valley is lost, Virginia is lost.”  And if Virginia is lost, what of America?

Notes:

[1] Yes, the thought that this might be an April Fool’s joke did occur to me.

[2] Ms. O’Neill also mentioned “the brook floater mussel, the green floater mussel,” as well as “a few species of fish.”

[3] Somewhat startlingly, the “AI overview” at the top of my google results for “Appalachian springsnail” referred back to me, myself, in a pdf document I posted on my own FWGNA site for the Commonwealth of Virginia back in 2011 [pdf].  At the request of my buddy Brian Watson, I had included the common name below the scientific name.  Otherwise, none of the other nine hits on the first page my google search for “Appalachian springsnail” were relevant [4].

[4] By contrast, my exploratory search for “Fontigens bottimeri” returned much more relevant information, including my species page on the FWGNA site.  In fact, from my search on Fontigens bottimeri I found the relevant US FWS species page, at which F. bottimeri is called the “Potomac Springsnail [5].”

[5] Whose ridiculous idea was it [6] to conjure out of thin air an elaborate parallel taxonomy of “common names” for obscure little creatures that legitimately have no common name?  When I was in fifth grade, my teacher explained that the binomial system of nomenclature was proposed by Linnaeus in 1753 to solve the chaos of multiple common names for the same organism.  Now it is happening again!  We have two “common names” for the same tiny little black speck-snail that never had a common name to begin with.

[6] Turgeon, D.D., J.F. Quinn, A.E. Bogan, E.V. Coan, F.G. Hochberg, W.G. Lyons, P.M. Mikkelson, R.J. Neves, C.F.E. Roper, G. Rosenberg, B. Roth, A. Scheltema, F.G. Thompson, M. Vecchione, and G.D. Williams (1998) Common and scientific names of aquatic invertebrates from the United States and Canada: Mollusks (second edition), American Fisheries Society Special Publication 26, Bethesda, Maryland, 526 pp.

[7] A deserted warehouse on the edge of town, seriously?  Staffed with henchmen, wearing black turtleneck sweaters, perhaps?

[8] I followed up with Matt on Tuesday morning 4/28.  He replied that “Because the State, and specifically the Secretary of DNR, is party to an ongoing lawsuit, I referred your inquiry to our Public Relations Manager, Gregg Bortz.”  I have yet to hear from Mr. Bortz.

[9] To be complete, F. nickliniana populations in the East and F. aldrichi in Missouri can extend some significant distance downstream.  But F. bottimeri populations, in my limited experience, are restricted to the springhead and immediate spring run.

[10] See Maddi’s April 27 article for a nice photo of Semple Run tumbling under Celeste Road at Site (F).

[11] I did apologize, sincerely and profusely.  Okay, it was 8:30 AM, still early, I suppose.  I honestly thought that all the racket I made on her front porch would have brought her to the door, but no.  I did not get her name.

[12] See here for a tribute to my home town of Waynesboro, Virginia:

• The Clean Water Act at 40 [7Jan13]