Hello, it's started raining for the first time in a
few weeks and
what that means is there's gonna be
different animals out and active in your
garden then there has been before. So up
until now we've been having loads of
butterflies and bumble bees and honey
bees out on our flowers.  Now with the wet weather it's giving other species a chance
particularly things like the snails.  I've
just been clearing this pot behind me
here and I've been
finding absolutely tonnes of snails out now
it's got wet and I want to show you a few of them.  You see this, this is just a normal
garden snail,  there's been quite a lot of
these of various sizes - they're fantastic!
They're quite beautiful when you look at them close-up.  Really beautiful things.  
 But I''m particularly getting tonnes and
tonnes of these are which are banded
snails and these although they're really
really varied they're dark-lipped banded
snails, they're all the same species.
These are really extraordinary variable
and it turns out this is to do with a
whole network of different genes
responsible for colour patterns. There are
genes responsible for the background
colour of the shell. There are genes
responsible for whether they have bands on them or not.
There are genes responsible for how far
that banding goes and whether it's broken or
not and the colour of the bands - so
absolutley loads of different interesting
genetics producing what's an incredibly
variable species and it's thought the
reason for this is to do with avoiding
predation.  So when you have predators
they'll choose certain colour patterns - so
what it means is there's different
selection on these things and what we can often find is that the frequency of
these different forms varies throughout
the year with different predation.  It
can also vary with the environment as well.  There may be an element of temperature
control as well.  So things like the
yellow patterns
which you can see here - things like this with a yellow back pattern becomes less
frequent the further north you go. So it's
to do with temperature control.
So even though it's raining and it's
just started raining again
it's time to get out and see some of the
other animals that are also going to be
coming out with the rain,  in particular
these fantastic snails because
they give you insights into natural
history, into selection pressure by
predators and also into some of the
remarkable genetics responsible for the
very very varied different
forms that we've found within a single species.
