Antonio Checa & Gerhard Cadée

The panel (John Taylor, Peter Skelton, and Brian Morton) agreed that the award should go to

Cheka, A.S. and Cadée, G.C. (1997)

Hydraulic burrowing in the bivalve Mya arenaria L. (MYOIDEA) and associated ligamental adaptations. Journal of Molluscan Studies 63(2), 157-172.

In responding to the President's letter informing them of the award, Drs Checa and Cadée thanked the Society for honouring them with the award. "This", they said, "came to us as a complete surprise. C.M.Yonge is one of our heroes, we highly treasure his important scientific publications and his popular book 'The Sea Shore' we still value as an excellent introduction to marine biology.

"It might interest you how we came to cooperate. In 1993 Antonio had published an interesting paper on non-predatory shell damage in deep-living bivalves (Palaeo-3 Vol. 100: 309-331). He suggested the (repaired shell damage to be due to digging by the bivalves themselves. Gerhard suggested that Antonio should come over to the Netherlands Institute for Sea Research (NIOZ) at Texel to test this hypothesis using Mya arenaria living in the Wadden Sea. We had never met before, but Antonio came over to Texel twice, where we collected living Mya and observed their (slow) digging movements in the laboratory. We never - up to now - concluded our experiments to really observe shell damage when they encounter stones or shells during digging, although we collected evidence that the number of repair scars is higher in specimens living in shell-rich sediments. Instead we became intrigued (or diverted) by the often slow but characteristic digging behaviour and the functional morphology of the hinge of Mya. The burrowing behaviour we studied intensively, helped by Antonio's wife Mercedes, making photographs, drawings and a video-film. We published a paper on the ligament of Mya (Cheka and Cadée, 1997. The ligament of Mya arenaria (Myoidea) revisited, Journal of the Marine Biological Association UK, 77: 1231-1233) mainly as a comment on C.M. Yonge's 1982 paper (how appropriate now!) on the ligament in Mactracea and Myacea in the same journal.

"We plan to continue our fruitful co-operation. Gerhard visited Antonio at his department of Stratigraphy and Palaeontology in the University of Granada in 1997 to give lectures on `the Wadden Sea as a playground for Aktuopalaeontologists' and became interested in the possibilities for studies on traces on shells and animal traces in the intertidal of the Gulf of Cadiz (Huelva/Algarve). We hope that you will hear more of this co-operation in the future."