Data from: Trophic sensitivity of invasive predator and native prey interactions: integrating environmental context and climate change

Climate change is predicted to intensify the impacts of invasive species
by enhancing their performance relative to their native counterparts.
However, few studies have compared the performance of invasive predators
and native prey, despite the fact that non-native predators are well known
to disrupt native communities. The ‘trophic sensitivity hypothesis’
suggests that predators are less tolerant of increasing environmental
stress than their prey, whereas the ‘tolerant invaders hypothesis’
suggests that invaders are more tolerant than native species due to
selection during the introduction process. It is therefore unclear how
invasive predators will respond to increasing climate stressors. We
coupled physiological measurements (thermal tolerance, thermal optima,
salinity tolerance, predation rate) with environmental time-series data to
assess the effects of warming and extreme low salinity events on
non-native predators (gastropods) and native prey (oysters) from a coastal
ecosystem. In general support of the trophic sensitivity hypothesis, we
found that both non-native predators exhibited lower thermal optima
relative to native prey, lower salinity tolerance and one predator was
less tolerant of warming. However, because warming tolerance was extremely
high (i.e. habitat temperature is 7·9–21 °C below thermal tolerance),
near-term warming may first increase predator performance (consumption and
growth rates), with negative effects on prey. Low salinity will likely
produce heterogeneous effects on predator–prey interactions due to varying
watershed sizes among estuaries that control the duration of low salinity
events. The trophic sensitivity hypothesis may be a useful framework for
understanding community responses to extreme climate change, which
portends a decoupling of predator–prey interactions. However, we conclude
that this hypothesis must be evaluated in environmental context and that
coupling physiological metrics with in situ environmental data offers the
best predictive power of near-term climate change impacts on invaded
communities. Within our study system, warming is likely to intensify the
impacts of both invasive predators, which may greatly reduce the abundance
of the native oyster, a species of conservation and restoration focus.