Bird’s-eye view

Envelopes sent to the University of New South Wales’ Center for Ecosystem Science have contained the feathers of birds from 480 sites across Australia. The feathers were sent in by citizens for a project that is mapping how birds are moving among the country’s wetlands. Dirty little secrets of mighty cockroach

The American cockroach is the largest common house cockroach, about the length of a AA battery. Also called the water bug, it can live for a week without its head. It eats just about anything, including feces, the glue on book bindings, and other cockroaches, dead or alive. It can fly short distances and run as fast as the human equivalent of 210 mph.

All these feats and more are encoded in the American cockroach’s genome, which was sequenced recently by Chinese scientists.

The scientists interfered with more than 20 genes thought to be related to immunity, reproduction and development, and found that doing so had damaging effects on the cockroaches. That’s promising for future pest-control methods, they said. Bringing back wolves restored other species

Since their reintroduction to Yellowstone National Park and Idaho in the 1990s, gray wolves have done so well that they’re reclaiming other parts of the northern Rockies.

In the places where they returned, wolves tidied up explosive deer and elk populations, which had eaten valleys barren. That helped bring back trees and shrubs. Birds and beavers, as well as the animals that live in dams, also returned. The wolves ate coyotes, freeing up their prey for others. With more trees controlling erosion, the flows of some rivers were less chaotic, forming pools that became new habitats.

‘‘We’re just uncovering these effects of large carnivores at the same time their populations are declining and are at risk,’’ said William Ripple, an ecologist at Oregon State University.