Aquatic. Weak middorsal keel. Maplike pattern. Small, yellow spot behind eye. 
Arkansas Herpetological Atlas 2019
This species is represented by 195 records from 28 sources: 108 museum (
), 0 literature (
), 0 research (
), and 46 observation (
), with 41 additional Trauth et al. (2004) locality points remaining unsourced (
). It has been museum vouchered for 22 of 75 counties (), with 21 additional counties having other forms of reported occurrence (). Years of collection range from 1855 to present.
This species is well documented from streams in the Ozark Highlands, northern Boston Mountains, and Caddo and Ouachita rivers in the Ouachita Mountains. Trauth et al. (2004) plotted many localities in the Arkansas Valley, South Central Plains, and Mississippi Alluvial Plain, which remain unsourced. The four sourced records outside of well established ranges–two from northern Monroe County (video vouchers CLO 440542 and 440545 from 2004), Little River County (KU 319190 from 1979), and Columbia County (MPM 16004 from 1976)–warrant reexamination. To provide further context from neighboring states, no known confirmed records exist for central or southern Oklahoma (Sievert and Taggart, 2020), Texas (Dixon, 2013), Mississippi (Powell et al., 2016), western third of Tennessee (Scott and Redmond, 2019), nor the Missouri Bootheel (Daniel and Edmond, 2020), with only a single confirmed state record from the Ouachita River in northcentral Louisiana (Boundy and Carr, 2017).
