The Award goes to Richard Meyrick, of Darwin College, University of Cambridge, for his PhD thesis on The biostratigraphy and dating of Holocene tufa successions in NW Europe. Dr Meyrick's thesis is clearly written and well structured, dealing with a vast amount of data obtained by established techniques. As well as presenting new insights into several regional faunal successions, the work draws useful conclusions for the whole region. It is particularly pleasing to give this Award for an outstanding piece of work which brings a malacological model into the wider sphere of the environmental sciences.

Bill Bailey

Sir Charles Maurice Yonge Award Panel: Liz Harper (chair), Alex Ball, Hugh Jones.

The winners of this year's Award, for the best bivalve paper published in the Journal of Molluscan Studies in 1999, were Marcel MouÎza, Olivier Gros and Liliane Frenkiel, of the Universite des Antilles et la Guyane in Guadeloupe, for their paper entitled Embryonic, larval and postlarval development of the tropical clam Anomalocardia brasiliana (Bivalvia, Veneridae), published in Volume 65, pages 73-88.

The judges were impressed with this careful, superbly illustrated study of the morphological changes that accompany the seven weeks from spawning to metamorphosis of this venerid clam. Anyone who has wrestled with a critical point drier will appreciate the technical expertise involved in the preparation and presentation of the material. Individuals of A. brasiliana, it appears, spawn throughout the year and the fertilized eggs have a rapid development, with larvae reaching a benthic plantigrade stage within 15 days. There are beautiful scanning electron microscope figures of the egg and sperm stage, through the blastula to the development of siphonal, gill and foot tissue. Although embryology and development have been studied in some venerids before, these have been primarily light microscopy studies. Such elegant scanning electron microscope studies have been reserved for taxa such as oysters with their world-wide economic importance. The species studied in this paper is eaten locally in the West Indies and Brazil, but is, in some areas, suffering over-exploitation. It is to be hoped that studies like this may assist the management of such taxa.

Liz Harper

Centenary Research Grants Panel: Robert Cameron (chair), Steve Hawkins, Richard Preece.

1. Ms P. Pal, Department of Zoology and Entomology, Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa, receives £300 to support "A comparative ultrastructural study on oogenesis and vitellogenesis in species of the marine pulmonate limpet Siphonaria (Gastropoda) with different reproductive strategies." Ms Pal is a research student, and the money is for travel and consumables (electron microscopy).

2. Ms E Iyengar, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA, receives £300 to support a study of "The evolution of kleptoparasitism within the genus Trichotropis (Gastropoda), with special attention to the evolutionary ecology of T. cancellata." Ms Iyengar is a research student. The money is for travel to Washington State and Alaska.

Robert Cameron