1. North American lacustrine freshwater mussels (Bivalvia: Unionidae) are one of the world’s most imperilled groups of organisms. Knowledge of their age structure and longevity is needed for the understanding and management of mussels. Current methods for age estimation in freshwater mussels are insufficient and may have resulted in an erroneous view of the ages of lacustrine freshwater mussels. 2. We collected growth data through mark‐recapture in Minnesota and Rhode Island, U.S.A., examining four lentic populations of three of the most common species of freshwater mussels, Elliptio complanata, Lampsilis siliquoidea, and Pyganodon grandis. Using an inversion of the von Bertalanffy growth equation, we estimated age at length from length‐specific growth relationships. 3. In some populations, lacustrine mussels may be much older than previously predicted. Ages predicted from actual growth rates suggest that individuals in some populations frequently reach ages in excess of a century, placing unionid mussels among the Earth’s longest‐lived animals. Alternatively, if growth has only recently slowed in these populations, generalized growth cessation may be occurring over a broad distributional range of some common North American lacustrine mussels.

We studied aggregation in 76 populations of freshwater mussels from relatively homogeneous surroundings in a wide range of habitats. Chi-square tests for spatial aggregation found only 53% of mussel populations significantly (p < 0.05) aggregated. The variance of replicate mussel samples (s2) varied with the mean number collected (m) as 1.49m1.17, but conformed to the general variance relation found for other aquatic taxa (m1.5) at m > 1. The number of replicate samples ([Formula: see text]) required to estimate mussel abundance with a given level of precision (D = SE/m) is approximately m−0.5D−2. Sampling mussels with large quadrats requires between 5 and 25 samples for 20% precision. Sampling designs to determine significant impacts (α = (β = 0.05) require 7–50 samples of each population to detect doubling or halving of the population density, or three to nine to detect order-of-magnitude changes. Large sampling units are recommended to ensure acceptable sampling precision and accurate chi-square analyses of spatial aggregation and to permit ecologists to detect significant impacts on freshwater mussel populations.

1. Two spedes of freshwater mussels, Lampsilis radiata siliquoidea and Anodonta grandis grandis were measured and permanently marked with pointed, plastic tape positioned at the postero-lateral edge of the shell. Mussels were returned to original conditions at two sites in an oligotrophic lake, retrieved at yearly intervals, re-measured, and external annuli that had been added since marking were counted. 2. External annuli were formed much less frequently than annually; the overall median number of annuli formed each year was 0.5. In one of the four populations studied, the rate of annulus formation was >1 in small animals and <1 in large ones. Many mussels showed no new external annuli at all, even several years after marking. 3. Ford -Walford plots of shell annuli did not yield consistent indices of shell growth. Repeated measurement of mussels in successive years showed that estimates of growth based on shell annuli consistently overestimated real shell growth.

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