Cross-trophic nutritional rescue and trait-based resilience in carnivore exposed to nutrient-deficient prey

Understanding how environmental stress reshapes ecological networks is essential to predicting and preserving ecosystem function. Drought, a globally pervasive stressor, can disrupt food webs through bottom-up cascades – altering plant quality, reducing herbivore nutritional content, and impairing predator foraging. Such disruptions threaten key ecosystem services like biological control. In a tri-trophic system involving tomato (Solanum lycopersicum), potato aphid (Macrosiphum euphorbiae), and the convergent lady beetle (Hippodamia convergens), our prior work demonstrated that predators consuming aphids from drought-stressed plants exhibited delayed development and reduced growth, despite unlimited prey access. Building on these findings, we investigate whether these sublethal effects on predators can be reversed through dietary rescue. We test two recovery strategies: (1) trophic rescue via diet switching to prey from well-watered plants, and (2) nutritional rescue via pollen supplementation. Across these treatments, we measure physiological (enzyme activity, metabolic rate), molecular (stress-response gene expression), developmental, and behavioral metrics. This integrative framework allows us to evaluate whether recovery is complete, partial, or trait-specific, offering insights into resilience mechanisms in carnivore responses to bottom-up nutritional stress. By identifying dietary strategies that mitigate predator impairment, this research contributes to a mechanistic understanding of resilience and offers potential interventions to support biological control in drought-affected agroecosystems.