The use of asteroid resources could benefit future space missions. Instead lifting the necessary materials off Earth, they can be then sourced directly in space. Asteroid capture missions aim to bring asteroids closer where permanently accessed. This paper introduces a new strategy for missions, two spacecraft are used capturing near-Earth asteroids. These act together as ‘pitcher’ and ‘catcher...

Archaeamphora longicervia H. Q. Li was described as an herbaceous, Sarraceniaceae-like pitcher plant from the mid Early Cretaceous Yixian Formation of Liaoning Province, northeastern China. Here, a re-investigation of A. longicervia specimens from the Yixian Formation provides new insights into its identity and the morphology of pitcher plants claimed by Li. We demonstrate that putative pitcher...

Ecological communities show great variation in species richness, composition and food web structure across similar and diverse ecosystems. Knowledge of how this biodiversity relates to ecosystem functioning is important for understanding the maintenance of diversity and the potential effects of species losses and gains on ecosystems. While research often focuses on how variation in species rich...

Pitchers are modified leaves used by carnivorous plants for trapping prey. Their fluids contain digestive enzymes from the plant and they harbor abundant microbes. In this study, the diversity of bacterial communities was assessed in Nepenthes pitcher fluids and the composition of the bacterial community was compared to that in other environments, including the phyllosphere of Arabidopsis, anim...

A long-standing but controversial hypothesis assumes that carnivorous plants employ aggressive mimicry to increase their prey capture success. A possible mechanism is that pitcher plants use aggressive mimicry to deceive prey about the location of the pitcher's exit. Specifically, species from unrelated families sport fenestration, i.e. transparent windows on the upper surfaces of pitchers whic...

A global crisis in marine fisheries was regarded with scepticism by many fisheries scientists as recently as 10 years ago. Today, however, few dispute worrying trends [Pitcher and Pauly 1998; Pitcher 2001; Pauly et al. 2002; Christensen et al. 2003; Hilborn et al. 2003; Pauly and Maclean 2003; Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) 2004]. Historical data from marine ecosystems clearly suggest ...