Hello Lief; I once did a mark-recapture study of the movement of a snail species that rested on stones in an intertidal mudflat. A dot of paint on all the individuals resting on one stone and different colored dots for the snails on different rocks.

The question was about whether the snails were faithful to their rock of origin. The same idea would work on the snails resting on a single root (or a particular height above the mud). Do the snails home between high tides?

This certainly plays into your evolutionary scenario. The morphometrics you plan can be correlated to the resting positions of the snails...dessication, predators, etc. That sounds like a tidy little study. Best luck, Jim Des Lauriers

We've compared butterfly wing colors in species that fly in the open and the shade. You'd expect butterflies in the shade to be darker for thermal reasons - and can show with dead butterflies that this works - but there are also other factors, such as crypsis and mimicry. Shuang Xing has several papers on this.

Thank you very much for your replies. Very much appreciated. :)

Maybe some comparisons in leaf damage among different plants (e.g. native vs exotic, trees vs. herbs, etc.) from gastropods or arthropods would be also interesting for your students..

Yes, James Des Lauriers' suggestion for marking gastropods works well with students. We used painted numbers to check neighbor's positions within color groups.

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