D. K. A. Barnes

There has been a recent shift in global perception of plastics in the environment, resulting in a call for greater action. Science and the popular media have highlighted plastic as an increasing stressor []. Efforts have been made to confer protected status to some remote locations, forming some of the world’s largest Marine Protected Areas, including several UK overseas territories.

For more than a century ecologists have considered that competitive interactions between species are more intense at low latitudes [1,2] . This is frequently invoked as either an explanation or a consequence of higher species richness in the tropics, also suggesting that competition shifts from intra- to inter-specific towards the tropics [1] .