FRESHWATER MUSSELS IN NORTH AMERICA : MUSEUM COLLECTIONS AND PRE-INDUSTRIAL BIOGEOGRAPHY

North America is the global diversity hotspot for freshwater mussels (Order: Unionoida), with nearly 300 of the known ~600 species. Sadly, ~70% of North American species have suffered population declines or extinctions over the past century. Our freshwater mussel collection at Wesleyan University (Middletown, CT) was mostly assembled in the 19th century, when North American faunas were still little impacted by human activity. The collection has been neglected for over 60 years and not well documented. We are digitising these collections and using our new data to better understand the pre-industrial biogeography of Unionoids. We first curated the collections by locating all Unionoid specimens, then assigning current species names and recovering specimen data through archival research. We assigned new institutional collection numbers and arranged specimens in current taxonomic order. To date, we have documented 1518 specimens in 338 lots, representing 144 species. There are 4 lots of presently extinct species and 57 lots of now Endangered-Critically Endangered species. Our collections include almost half of known North American species, and the diverse Atlantic and Mississippi fauna is well represented. Our specimens were acquired from various sources, including the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History (USNM), correspondents of Isaac Lea, a prolific early author of Unionoids, and from Charles M. Wheatley, whose provided specimens furnished the cabinets of many 19^th century authors. As such, some of our specimens have been identified as likely syntypes, paratypes or topotypes. We have started to reconstruct radiation centres and patterns of these faunas by documenting the incidences of species with functional traits such as shell sculpture, based on phylogeography. The previously inaccessible “dark data” in the Wesleyan collections will add to information on known historical localities, as we populate our iDigBio database.