Since the onset of mass production of plastics in the 1950’s the flux of plastics to the marine environment has been a growing problem (Cole at al., 2011), such that microplastic contamination of the oceans is now one of the world’s most pressing environmental concerns (Hurley et al., 2018).
The world’s oceans and their ecosystems are under threat from anthropogenic activities that are interacting to produce complex changes like never before.
Tracing the effects of human induced selection pressures through the genomes of wild species offers unprecedented insight into the way species evolve and adapt to changing environments.
Sexual selection has generated an incredible amount of biodiversity. The idea that exaggerated male traits and female choice for those traits become associated to produce runaway sexual selection is widely accepted.
As plastics pass through the Earth System after disposal, they weather. As the polymers gradually oxidise, they lose mass producing methane, ethane, ethene and associated gasses.
Climate models show that the effects of climate change, e.g. sea surface temperature increase and ocean acidification, will be most intense at the poles.
The increases in atmospheric concentrations of CO2 (pCO2), that are associated with climate change, cause decreases in the nutritional value of plants to the herbivorous insects that feed upon them.
Alien species, those introduced outside their native range, can cause huge ecological and economic damage. With increasing global trade, the number of new alien species is growing rapidly, and identifying which ones will be future invaders is an urgent global challenge.
