Group+4+Intro

Group 4 - Ahmer Sheikh*, Azam Sheikh, Sami Kamal, Danielle Maas, Khushbu Hussain, Nazrath Nawaz

// Cepaea nemoralis //, more commonly known as the Grove Snail or Brown Lipped Snail, is a species of snail widespread in many parts of northern, western and central Europe.

Due to its highly polymorphic shell nature, fast reproductive rate and generally slow locomotion, //Caepaea nemoralis// has long become a model organism studied in evolutionary research. The //Caepaea nemoralis// sample studied in this experiment has the possibility of a banding pattern on either a brown, pink or yellow shell. As well as varying shell colours, the //Caepaea nemoralis// snail can also vary in band numbers ranging from bandless to a maximum of five bands. For the purposes of this experiment, only those snails with bands within the range of 0-5 were studied.

During this field experiment, a belt transect was taken along the length of the hill. This enabled us to sample populations at different altitudes, whilst keeping other variables constant. In total, four samples were taken, approximately 40 metres apart, with a sample range of 20 metres either side of the transect line (40 metres in total).The first sample was taken on top of the hill, (Zone 1, Figure 1) the next sample was taken at the base of the hill, going towards the far tree line (Zone 2, Figure 1). Sample 3 was taken at the base of the hill, in the woodland area (Zone 3, Figure 1). The final sample was taken at the upper part of the woodland area, (Zone 4, Figure 1). As shown by Figure 1, Zones 1 and 4 have the same approximate altitude up the sides of both hills. Zones 2 and 3 also share a similar altitude as they were at the base of the hill. Zones 1 and 2 being in bushy/grassland and Zones 3 and 4 being in woodland. It was deemed that the range at each zone would be sufficient in order to obtain a reasonable sample size and the distance between each sample zone ensured that there was a minimal risk of pseudoreplication taking place. The distance between the samples also ensured that there was minimal gene flow between different populations.

Figure 1)