COMMON FISHES OF MISSISSIPPI RIVER 
209 
Drum. Aplodinotus grunniens Rafmesque 
SHEEPSHEAD 
Conspicuous for its abundance, its appearance in the water, and its frequent 
vociferous announcement of its presence, the drum is well known to all concerned 
with fishing in the Mississippi and its tributaries. As Wagner says (1908), writing of 
the drum in Lake Pepin, the peculiar sound it produces is a characteristic feature of 
every twilight boat ride. Its distribution is very broad: “Throughout the Great 
Lakes Basin and the Mississippi Valley, between the Alleghanies and the western 
plains, ranging from Lake Champlain to the Red River of the North, and through the 
Ohio Basin to Alabama, Louisiana, Arkansas, Texas, and Mexico.” (Forbes and 
Richardson, 1908.) It is unfortunately often known and marketed as “white perch,” 
the name perch, properly applicable to fishes of a single family, being at almost any 
Figure 29.— Drumfish or sheepshead, Aplodinotus grunniens. (Locally but erroneously, called “perch”) 
place generally fitted to whatever fish seems most abundant. In many southern 
localities of original French influence it bears the distinctive and euphonious name of 
“gaspergou.” 
It is notable not only for its drumming sound but also for the powerful grinding 
apparatus (pharyngeal teeth) it possesses in the back part of its mouth and with 
which it may grind up the thinner-shelled mollusks that seem often to constitute the 
bulk of its food. Its relation to the pearly mussels that it devours is not altogether 
one-sided, for it thus exposes itself to infection with the glochidia (larval stages) of 
mussels; so that, of all fishes, it commonly carries the heaviest load of young mussels 
to be fostered, transported, and planted on the river bed, and then to grow up to 
become the food of other drumfishes. The drum is the only known fish that system- 
atically, if unintentionally-, grows its own food. 
Not all of the mussels that it carries are directly valuable to man, but at least 
one useful species, the butterfly mussel, appears to owe its continued existence to the 
drum; and another, the washboard mussel, is aided by it and by other species. The 
drum is to be accounted a resource of double value— first, as an abundant food fish and, 
second, as an agent in the natural propagation of commercial fresh-water mussels, 
from which are made so staple an article as pearl buttons. 
