Peter Raymond Grant FRS FRSC (born October 26, 1936) and Barbara Rosemary Grant FRS FRSC (born October 8, 1936) are a British married couple who are evolutionary biologists at Princeton University.
Since 1973, the Grants have spent six months of every year capturing, tagging, and taking blood samples from finches on the island.
Charles Darwin originally thought that natural selection was a long, drawn out process but the Grants have shown that these changes in populations can happen very quickly.
[1] The Grants were the subject of the book The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time by Jonathan Weiner, which won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction in 1995.
[2] The Balzan Prize citation states: The Grants are both Fellows of the Royal Society, Peter in 1987, and Rosemary in 2007.
In 2008, the Grants were among the thirteen recipients of the Darwin-Wallace Medal, which is bestowed every fifty years by the Linnean Society of London.
In 2009, they were recipients of the annual Kyoto Prize in basic sciences, an international award honouring significant contributions to the scientific, cultural and spiritual betterment of mankind.
This project was put on hold when she accepted a biology teaching job at the University of British Columbia,[5] where she met Peter Grant.
[6] Peter Raymond Grant was born in 1936 in London, but relocated to the English countryside to avoid encroaching bombings during World War II.
[6] For his doctoral degree, Peter Grant studied the relationship between ecology and evolution and how they were interrelated.
[6] They compared the differences of bill length to body size between populations living on the Islands and the nearby mainland.
[8] Grant also states that there are many causes for increased competition: reproduction, resources, amount of space, and invasion of other species.
[8] Daphne Major, in the Galápagos Islands, was a perfect place to perform experiments and study changes within birds.
It was isolated and uninhabited; any changes that were to occur to the land and environment would be due to natural forces with no human destruction.
The finch species with smaller beaks struggled to find alternate seeds to eat.
Descendants of G. conirostris and local finches (G. fortis) have become a distinct species, the first example of speciation to be directly observed by scientists in the field.
However, in the time between the droughts (beginning in late 1982), the large ground finch (Geospiza magnirostris) had established a breeding population on the island.
The 2003 drought and resulting decrease in food supply may have increased these species' competition with each other, particularly for the larger seeds in the medium ground finches' diet.
[18] In Evolution: Making Sense of Life, the takeaway from the Grants' 40-year study can be broken down into three major lessons.
[2] They were able to witness the evolution of the finch species as a result of the inconsistent and harsh environment of Daphne Major directly.
Awards and recognition include:[2] Societies and Academies: Honorary Degrees Associate Editor of Scientific Journals Honorary citizen of Puerto Bacquerizo, I. San Cristobal, Galapagos- 2005– Awards and recognition include:[2] Societies and Academies: Honorary Degrees: Honorary citizen of Puerto Bacquerizo, I. San Cristobal, Galapagos- 2005– Since 2010, she has been honoured annually by the Society for the Study of Evolution with the Rosemary Grant Graduate Student Research Award competition, which supports "students in the early stages of their PhD programs by enabling them to collect preliminary data... or to enhance the scope of their research beyond current funding limits".