The Pennsylvania State University University Park, Pennsylvania
Climate change has the potential to affect the way we approach biological control. Abiotic environmental stress can affect insects directly via changes in their phenology and habitat microclimate, but abiotic stress can also affect insects indirectly through changes in the condition of the plants they occupy. Droughts affect plant nutrition, anti-herbivore defenses, and physiology in ways that influence herbivore performance and behavior. In addition, changes in prey quality and availability can scale up to affect higher trophic level consumers. However, the impact of a natural enemy on a pest is a combination of the natural enemy’s consumptive and their non-consumptive effects on the pest population. Natural enemy non-consumptive effects are changes in prey traits in response to predation risk, which can ultimately reduce pest populations. If abiotic stress conditions and biotic predation risk effects both can impact prey traits, how do these two stressors intersect? In this talk, we will discuss the individual trait changes of aphids in response to drought stress and predation risk, explore the effects of drought stressed plants on biological control by a parasitoid, and consider the future research directions for this field. To understand the full picture of how biological control will be shaped by a changing world, we have to consider the consequences of abiotic stress for both consumptive and non-consumptive interactions.
