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The Independent Review of the Water Trigger Legislation and Post Implementation Review were tabled in Parliament today.

It's not clear that there is a sufficient reward to justify much new investment in storage and firming capacity, given the presence of Snowy, Tas Hydro, and existing gas and coal generation.

For the first time, wind and solar exceeded 10% of total electricity generation in the US for the month of March.

Volunteers help unearth Aboriginal rock art in the Blue Mountains; English-born chef Tim Burn calls the outback town of Tibooburra home; and 'chicken couture' for a brood of featherless chooks.

Forestry researchers condemn attempts to change the way carbon from trees is counted in Europe.

Originally published in the Manchester Guardian on 21 June 1917

Surrey
The soil responds quickly now to every genial touch. Meadows and clover fields which, after they had been cut and the hay gathered, appeared brown and sere two days ago were this morning, after a spell of rain, as green almost as in spring. The foot sank among rich young leaves and blades along the ditch side below, where wild pink roses have opened as if by some quick stroke or call. On the very top of flowering brambles yellowhammers perched, preening their feathers, and started a little song the last note of which drew out longer than the others. There was a pause and a spell of silence until the song was run through again, the heads of the birds bobbing yellow in the sunshine all the while.

With a rising wind at evening, grey clouds, almost black, came sweeping up the down, scattering the white fruit of dandelions. In the distance they seemed heavy and low enough to envelop you in darkness, but presently it was nothing but a slightly damp flicker wafting across your face. Higher the sky was a clear blue, with long thin flecks depending, which scarcely moved, and in the middle distance swifts circling, diving, now going higher with a tireless flutter of wings, then gliding as they pleased without apparent sign of any kind of power. No matter which way you turn now there are always swifts, and within a few minutes a pair will come down with sharp but sweet cries as they dash above and around. Another and yet another two or three will join them, until, waywardly, all shoot up towards the sky again. So many are they that a lark, strong as his singing is, seems lonely.

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With its unusual name and even more unusual habits, the hoatzin is a clear frontrunner for the title of the world’s most bizarre bird

We left Romero Rainforest Lodge just before sunrise, heading down the Manú River and into the unknown. The sickly-sweet scent of uvos – a mango-like fruit – wafted across the murky waters, hanging heavy in the humid air.

As dawn broke, birds started to appear out of nowhere. Flocks of sand-coloured nighthawks lived up to their name, hawking acrobatically over the surface of the water to seize unseen insects with their broad bills. As the sky began to lighten, they were joined by black skimmers: elegant, tern-like birds whose huge bill is longer at the bottom than the top, as we could see when one kept pace with our speedboat. Overhead, pairs of gaudy blue-and-yellow macaws flew high over the rainforest, as if in slow motion.

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Giant northern cockroaches are surprisingly caring parents. Urasimaru/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

To most people, cockroaches are abhorrent, disease-ridden pests, scuttling under the fridge when you go to the kitchen for a midnight snack. But those who know cockroaches well understand that they can be very caring creatures.

There are about 5,000 named cockroaches, and in a small minority of species mothers look after their babies (nymphs), and feed and care for them in a protective burrow. A good example is the Australian giant burrowing cockroach (Macropanesthia rhinoceros), which lives mainly in northern Queensland.

Around 20 baby cockroaches live with their mother for 5-6 months, and she drags leaves collected from the soil surface down into the burrow for food. If you’re so inclined, you can buy a pair of adult giant burrowing cockroaches as pets for around A$150.00, and see their maternal behaviour for yourself.

Macropanesthia rhinoceros, Frantisek Vecernik. Pinterest

Some cockroach mothers are even more caring, with elaborate parenting behaviours to look after their babies. The mother wood-burrowing cockroach (Cryptocercus) from North America lays its eggs in a nest formed in a rotting log.

Mum and dad wood roach then live in the nest with 20 or so nymphs for three years or more. The parents defend, extend and clean the gallery, feeding the young by regurgitating food (much like many birds do) and with specialised fluids produced by glands in their gut. The babies return the favour, spending almost 10% of their time grooming the adults.

These cockroaches have an unusual diet: they digest the cellulose in wood with the help of specialised gut microbes. The nymphs don’t have these microbes when they are born, but obtain them by feeding on the regurgitated contents of their parents’ stomachs. Eventually the teenage cockroaches leave the parental nest to form their own nests.

Cryptocercus adult (dark brown) and nymph (light brown) from the eastern US. David Maddison

Until recently, maternal care in cockroaches was considered an evolutionary oddity. A few other insect groups have similar behaviour, but it was considered to be just one of a range of (often bizarre) strategies that insects have evolved to increase the survival chances of their offspring.

However, as our understanding of insect relationships has increased in recent years, maternal care in cockroaches is now seen not as a strange evolutionary dead end, but an important stepping stone in the development of the huge, complex and well-ordered societies formed by other insect species. This realisation is partly down to the fact that we now know termites evolved from cockroaches. This was first discovered in 2000 by a team led by a laboratory at the University of Sydney, and has been confirmed numerous times since then.

Termite time

Termites are known as Isoptera to entomologists – and never as “white ants” because termites bear no close relation to true ants at all.

As it happens, some of the earliest-evolved groups of termites live in Australia. The giant northern termite (Mastotermes darwiniensis) is found only in Australia, north of the tropic of Capricorn. They show similar maternal care to the wood roach in north America, but have extended this behaviour even further.

These termites live in colonies that number in the thousands or millions. At the centre of the colony is a mother (queen), and father (king), and these are responsible for reproduction. A queen giant termite can lay millions of eggs in its lifetime? and live for decades. Giant northern termites live in a nest underground, or inside rotting wood, and because they almost never see the sunshine they have become pale (hence the erroneous term “white ant”).

However small and pale, these termites can be a major agricultural pest in northern Australia because they consume almost anything organic, including living and dead plants, and trees, rubber, leather - even plastic. They digest cellulose from plant material using specialised gut microbes, much like wood roaches do.

Giant northern termite, Mastotermes darwiniensis, worker caste. scienceimage.csiro.au

How do giant northern termite colonies containing thousands or millions of individuals differ from the 20 nymphs of the wood roach? The first and most obvious difference is that the termite colony contains several types of individuals: the reproductive kings and queens; the soldiers who defend the nest; and the workers who clean and excavate the next, carry out running repairs, and gather food.

These different types (castes) have different anatomies, each tailored to their job. In contrast, all wood roaches look the same, and the nymphs leave the parental nest, find a partner and begin their own little families.

The second major difference is that the king and queen termite outlive their children (the soldiers and workers) many times over, and as a result their offspring never leave home. This in turn begs the question: what makes the workers and soldiers forego reproduction and spend all their lives in the colony?

The king and queen produce biological signalling chemicals called pheromones, which are transferred to the workers that feed on the king and queen’s excretions. In essence, the parents are feeding their young a chemical that makes them stay at home and help mum and dad with the housework.

This is a neat, self-regulating system: if mum or dad dies, the chemical isn’t produced and some of the youngsters begin reproducing for themselves.

It is unusual for any animal to surrender the opportunity to propagate its own genes, and there must be a very good evolutionary reason for it. Highly cooperative behaviour is thought to develop when the benefits of living together outweigh the benefits of building or finding your own nest.

Perhaps we can even think of termites as cockroaches that love their babies a little bit too much.

David Yeates receives funding from CSIRO, The Australian Biological Resources Study, the US National Science Foundation, and holds the Schlinger endowed research position at the Australian National Insect Collection.

Thanks to new legislation, NOAA will be able to boost its ability to predict major weather-related events, such as hurricanes, droughts, floods and wildfires – and improved forecasts could have significant business impacts

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Volunteer rescuers have been learning how to save marine creatures when they wash up on the beach.

Sainsbury’s has launched a new ‘Fairly Traded’ tea range. Well and good, but the fear is they may seek to swerve Fairtrade’s tough regulations

We know the drill. An appealing product gets listed by a major retailer, becomes well loved by consumers only for that retailer to replace it with an own-brand version.

Sainsbury’s says its new system is up to date, focusing more on climate change

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Science reporter Victoria Gill joins researchers in Arizona to find out how President Trump's wall could affect endangered desert wildlife.

Nasa chief engineer Ashitey Trebi-Ollennu on the robots that are changing the world.

How President Trump's "great wall" on US-Mexico border could affect endangered desert wildlife.

New Forest South Only on private land can we experience a sense of remoteness that was once commonplace here

Small heath butterflies flirt among the delicate pink flowers of sea-spurrey. A solitary meadow brown flashes past, wind-driven and quickly lost against the muddy crust of dried-out estuarine pools.

There’s bright blue sky overhead, but the spinnaker-ballooning yachts out in the Solent lean over on a choppy white-tipped sea. Oystercatchers hunker down in the gulleys above which three forest ponies graze. Their movement disturbs a group of shelduck sheltering in a dip that bob fleetingly into sight.

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What does a five gram microbat have in common with a four metre, dead, dense beaked whale? More than you might think.

In Australia an estimated 85 per cent of our clothes end up in landfill and with the rise of fast fashion that figure growing fast.

Wildlife photographer Joel Sartore has photographed more than 6,000 contained species so far. He explains why.

Museum Victoria collects gelatinous fish, spiny crabs, scarlet sea-spiders, nightmarish cookie cutter sharks and plenty of rubbish

• Gallery: Deep sea discoveries: sea pigs, a dumbo octopus and glow-in-the-dark sharks

There’s no sunlight four kilometres below the waves but there is light.

It comes from a sea cucumber that emits a faint glow from its sticky skin, attracting fish and crabs that try to take bites out of its side. The skin is both a lure and a trap, marking incautious predators with a sticky glowing dot, an “eat me” sign to any passing larger predators.

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Images of bizarre deep sea creatures found in May and June by the research ship Investigator as it travelled along the Australian coastline to the Coral Sea. The scientists aboard the ship mapped the sea floor to a depth of 4,000 metres and collected more than 1,000 different marine species, about a third of which were new to science and half of which showed some kind of bioluminescent quality

• Voyage to the sea floor: expedition returns with fascinating finds

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