The Dark Room

In a place where the light of day never is seen, where even the diurnal must work in blackness, there lies the small and creatively named room called “the dark room.” It is within these walls where I hit the point of no return. If errors occurred during the precise setup process or if my x-rays suffered from overexposure it would be here where I would know.

My project uses x-ray images of snail shells to quantify how shell shapes vary between Mountainsnails (Oreohelix). I develop these x-ray images in “the dark room” then scan them onto a computer. I then use geometric morphometric analysis technique to create and compare landmarks on the shells to quantify the differences between the different shell shapes. Understanding how the shapes of the snail shells vary can help us gain important information about what changes have occurred and how they have changed from their ancestral state. We will then use these quantified differences and compare that with genetic data. This will help determine if some of these changes are due to phenotypic plasticity (flexibility with a species trait) or if they are all significant genetic differences.

This project is a piece of a larger project that is looking at these particular snails because the area around the lower Salmon River in Idaho is a biological hotspot for Mountiansnails (Oreohelix). These Mountainsnails display remarkable variety of shell patterns and genetic diversity. In this area, there are around 24 described species and as many as 15 new species that need to be described. They are one of the most diverse snail assemblages from a single genus in North America. Even so, in recent years these snail populations have been declining. Since these snails can be an indicator of ecosystem health, understanding more about these snails, how they live and what they look like, gives us insight about the quality of our surroundings.

So I return to darkness, my old friend, to uncover the truth. Is there a hidden meaning behind these different shapes? There is much to learn from them still. We can only hope that we learn enough before some are lost forever.