Shells in Class!!

For today's class, we chose partners for an activity involving shells. My partner was Linfei, and we were given a bag of shells that were collected from the same beach. We were to separate and group these shells by different characteristics, such as size, color, patterns, etc. We did this a few time. The first time, Linfei and I separated the shells by their patterns, like whether there were stripes or not. The second time, we separated them by whether the lines on the shells were vertical or horizontal, no matter their shape. For the last time, we divided the shells into different groups by size.

Halfway through, we realized that many of these shells had holes in them, mostly on the top. These holes indicated that the animals that had lived inside the shells were attacked by other organisms from outside of the shells, who could use their tongues as drills to dig holes on the shells. The shells were then empty because the outside organism had eaten them. However, difference in shells was not an evidence of evolution, but more as result of mutation. Based on different environment, physical appearances of shells would alter, possibly due to trying to camouflage. Due to the mutations, shells were able to pass down the genes that helped them to survive and reproduce.