A post on a local history page featured these small shells from Lake Erie. I remember them well. But a image search for periwinkle shows shells that are much fatter. Are these some variation of periwinkles?
Dennis
I’m not a biologist, but what I can find right now on periwinkles all show the “fatter” kind. And this page about shells from the Great Lakes reference a different genus, with conical shells, Pleurocera.
But that’s the biologist definition. According to Merriam-Websters you can call any old snail a periwinkle:
Before today, I’ve never heard periwinkle used to refer to anything other than marine gastropods (which are very tasty!) or the flowers and associated colour.
Calling pleurocerids periwinkles is just a quaint regionalism.
I wonder if they are edible. You would need a lot of them. The rivers around here have several species of mussels. At my grandfather’s farm on the Black River near Grafton you can find ones over 4" long.
Dennis