You can choose from any of the ~6000 species with DEB parameters in the AmP collection www.bio.vu.nl/thb/deb/debl...

But the pastoral industry loves it and thinks it deserves an Order of Australia www.beefcentral.com/news/buffel-.... If you love Central Australia, help pressure the Federal Government to declare it a national weed and invest in the development of biological controls.

The devil grass is not only an ecological disaster - it's a social one for the First Nations people of the arid zone, including the Anangu www.google.com/url?sa=t&sou...

It changes fire regimes to be more intense and burns the country to a monoculture. It is the light green in the photo, spreading up into the hills replacing Triodia. Efforts to control it by spraying or weeding are now like trying to hold back the tide and the only real hope is biological control.

I was with John Read who has watched it spread over the 25 years of regular visits. It's spreading by wind, humans, cars and mammals. It's killing river red gums, figs, mulga woodlands, and smothering flower-filled native grasslands and spinifex-covered sand dunes and plains.

I’ll take these mating grasshoppers back to the Uni of Melbourne where we will raise their offspring to see what their problem is!

The parthenogenetic species meets the sexual ones (from which it evolved by hybridisation) on the outskirts of Kalgoorlie where this hybrid mating happens naturally. They form “hybrid zones” where triploid offspring have very low fitness meaning they can’t coexist.

I’ve collected males from nearby sexual populations and set them up with the parthenogenetic females (who haven’t had sex for a couple of hundred thousand years). What should happen is that the males’ sperm fertilises the cloned eggs so that their offspring will have three sets of chromosomes.