Recent Research Grants Awarded

Awards made in 2005

£1000 towards research into new molluscan names introduced by César-Marie-Felix Ancey
and imaging of the type material from the collections of C.M.F. Ancey in the Melvill-Tomlin collection at National Museums and Galleries of Wales, Cardiff, and in the Dautzenberg collection, Brussels.

Awards made in 2006

 

£1000 towards research into the origin of lip colour polymorphism in Cepaea nemoralis
The shell of the land snail Cepaea nemoralis is highly polymorphic, yet the lip colour is almost invariantly black or dark brown, despite the lip gene being on the same chromosome and very tightly linked to the other shell colour and banding genes. Intriguingly, a few populations of the species are polymorphic for their lip colour – this could be due to either repeated evolution, or else, because the present-day polymorphic populations are derived from the same Pleistocene refugial populations. The aim of this project will be to collect further samples of snails, then use genetic methods to investigate whether populations with the rare lip colour (white) have a common origin. This may shed light on the origin of the lip colour polymorphism; the project will also contribute towards understanding the post-glacial colonisation of Britain and Ireland.

£660 towards research into the identification of Bathymodiolus sp. (Bivalvia: Mytilidae) in NE Atlantic cold seeps using molecular genetics.
Mytilid specimens belonging to the genus Bathymodiolus were recently collected in the Gulf of Cadiz, off the Moroccan margin and represent the first record of this hydrothermal vent and cold seep endemic mussel in the Northeast Atlantic. The shell features suggest that they are closely related to Bathymodiolus mauritanicus Cosel, 2002 from Mauritania. The aim of this project is to identify the Gulf of Cadiz specimens using molecular techniques. Several loci of nuclear (18S and 28S rRNA) and mitochondrial (COI and ND4) DNA will be sequenced and compared to existing mytilid sequences available in DNA databases and the data will be used to construct phylogenetic relationships among Bathymodiolus species. The results will give new insights into the biogeographic distribution and evolutionary history of the mussels inhabiting chemosynthetic ecosystems.

Award made in 2007

An award of €750 and two years' membership of the Society was sponsored at the 2007 UNITAS Conference for the best student poster on a conservation / biodiversity theme.
It went to Joaquim Reis, a Ph.D. student at the University of Lisbon, Portugal, for his poster (presented jointly with Rafael Araujo from Spain).The title of the poster was: Unio tumidiformis Castro 1885: A highly endangered endemic species (Bivalvia: Unionidae) from the south-western Iberian Peninsula.
Further details are available here.