Organisms can change their traits to defend against threats like predators or stress. These changes can help, but they might also hurt performance when the threat is gone. This mismatch is important to understand. Most studies only look at one aspect of this, but in reality, organisms face many different challenges at once. In a study on marine bryozoans, individuals with a defended trait were more sensitive to osmotic stress but less likely to be eaten by predators compared to those without the trait. This shows that the costs and benefits of having a defended trait are more complex than we thought, and we need to consider how these traits affect performance in multiple environments.