This isn’t the first time that we have chosen a non-mussel as the freshwater mussel of the month. As recently as last February, we selected Monodacna colorata for Valentines Day, and for April Fools 2013, it was Corbicula fluminea. The selection of a sphaeriid clam (= fingernail or pea clam) this month is to highlight (once again) how much information we have on this site about freshwater bivalves generally —although our bias admittedly leans heavily toward the Unionoida.
This month, we want to call attention to a bit of data entry we have recently completed. Thanks to the generosity of our friend, Yuri Kantor, we have recently captured the bivalve data in Vinarski & Kantor (2016). That means, we have captured their combinations of genera and species, and those data are served in the Mussel Project Database. This includes freshwater mussels, the Sphaeriidae, and the other freshwater bivalve taxa found in the former Soviet Union. We have written quite a bit about Russian bivalve taxonomy over the years, most recently in the context of Anodonta anatina.
In the MUSSELpdb, you can access those taxonomic opinions at the level individual species. For example, in the synonym of Pisidium amnicum, at the very top is Tellina amnica Müller, 1774. That is the original combination of the nominal species. Our data suggest that the species has been regarded as valid since it was described (true for the minority of freshwater bivalves). Each of those opinions comes with a link to relevant references — e.g., Vinarski & Kantor (2016).
If you click the link to that publication (or any publication), you can get a list of genera and/or species introduced therein, as well as a list of species regarded as valid and their synonyms.
As of the instant of typing this sentence, we have 76084 taxonomic opinions about species from 1400 different works. Some entries are more complete that others, but we hope that these data provide an entree to the freshwater bivalve literature. |
