"Muddy waters wet and green and three fellows in between"

The C M Yonge Award for a published work on bivalves goes to Karl-Otto Nagel, Guido Badino and Bruno Alessandria of the Department of Animal Biology of the University of Turin, Italy, for their paper on the Population Genetics of European Anodontinae (Bivalvia: Unionidae) ( Journal of Molluscan Studies (1996) 62, 343-357). The winners, decided by the casting vote of the chairman of the three adjudicators, Peter Skelton, Brian Morton and Hugh Jones, had produced a nice and solid piece of topical work, of interest to Europeans, with an excellent and thorough genetic and cladistic analysis of Anodonta, with interesting comments on the timing of splits.

The taxonomy of Anodonta long puzzled biologists, since it was unclear which characters should be used to define species. Although von Gallenstein established reliable shell characters for the species of central and northern Europe in 1895, the status of the Anodontinae of southern Europe is still debatable. Enzyme electrophoresis supported the separation of the two genera Anodonta and Pseudanodonta with four diagnostic loci. A. cygnaea, A. anatina and the sole species of Pseudanodonta, P. complanata, occur in western and central Europe, while two other taxa of uncertain rank occur in the Mediterranean area. The genetic distances suggest that the diversification of European Anodontinae took place in the middle-late Pleistocene.

The three authors are caught in characteristic activities - Karl-Otto collecting mussels, Guido steering the boat, and Bruno doing the minute laboratory work.