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- Definition of Food Chain. A food chain shows energy pathways in ecosystems. Each ecosystem on the planet has food chains of organisms ranging from producers to consumers.
- Food Chains and Food Webs. Food chains differ from food webs in that they are showing a single line of feeding relationships. Food webs actually consist of many food chains together.
- Definition of Trophic Levels. A trophic level is a step in the food chain that each organism occupies. In a simple food chain, it is easy to see the trophic pyramid.
- General Food Chain Types. Most food chains consist of at least producers and primary consumers. Some chains are more complex and have secondary consumers and tertiary consumers.
- Key points:
- Introduction
- Autotrophs vs. heterotrophs
- Food chains
- Decomposers
- Food webs
- Grazing vs. detrital food webs
- Energy transfer efficiency limits food chain lengths
•Producers, or autotrophs, make their own organic molecules. Consumers, or heterotrophs, get organic molecules by eating other organisms.
•A food chain is a linear sequence of organisms through which nutrients and energy pass as one organism eats another.
•In a food chain, each organism occupies a different trophic level, defined by how many energy transfers separate it from the basic input of the chain.
•Food webs consist of many interconnected food chains and are more realistic representation of consumption relationships in ecosystems.
Organisms of different species can interact in many ways. They can compete, or they can be symbionts (long-term partners with a close association). Or, of course, they can do what we so often see in nature programs: one of them can eat the other. (Chomp!) That is, they can form one of the links in a food chain.
In ecology, a food chain is a series of organisms that eat one another (so that energy and nutrients flow from one to the next). For example, if you had a hamburger for lunch, you might be part of a food chain that looks like: grass → cow → human. But what if you had lettuce on your hamburger? In that case, you're also part of a food chain that looks like: lettuce → human.
As this example illustrates, we can't always fully describe what an organism (such as a human) eats with one linear pathway. For situations like that, we may want to use a food web, which consists of many intersecting food chains and represents the different things an organism can eat, and be eaten by.
In this article, we'll take a closer look at food chains and food webs, seeing how they represent the flow of energy and nutrients through ecosystems.
What basic strategies do organisms use to get food? Some organisms, called autotrophs (“self-feeders”), can make their own food – that is, their own organic compounds – out of simple molecules like carbon dioxide. There are two basic types of autotrophs:
•Photoautotrophs, such as plants, use energy from sunlight to make organic compounds (sugars) out of carbon dioxide in photosynthesis. Other examples of photoautotrophs include algae and cyanobacteria.
•Chemoautotrophs use energy from chemicals to build organic compounds out of carbon dioxide (or similar molecules). This is called chemosynthesis. For instance, there are hydrogen sulfide-oxidizing chemoautotrophic bacteria found in undersea vent communities (where no light can reach).
Autotrophs are the foundation of every ecosystem on the planet. That may sound dramatic, but it's no exaggeration! Autotrophs form the base of food chains and food webs, and the energy they capture from light or chemicals sustains all the other organisms in the community. When we're talking about their role in food chains, we can call autotrophs producers.
Now, we can take a look at how energy and nutrients move through a ecological community. Let's start by considering just a few “who eats whom” relationships – that is, by looking at a food chain.
A food chain is a linear sequence of organisms through which nutrients and energy pass as one organism eats another. Let's look at the parts of a typical food chain, starting from the bottom (the producers) and moving upward.
•At the base of the food chain lie the primary producers. The primary producers are autotrophs, and are most often photosynthetic organisms (such as plants, algae, or cyanobacteria).
•The organisms that eat the primary producers are called primary consumers. Primary consumers are usually herbivores (plant-eaters), though they may be algae or bacteria eaters.
•The organisms that eat the primary consumers are called secondary consumers. Secondary consumers are generally meat-eaters (carnivores).
•The organisms that eat the secondary consumers are called tertiary consumers. These are carnivore-eating carnivores, like eagles or big fish.
One other group of consumers deserves mention, although it does not always appear in drawings of food chains. This group consists of decomposers, organisms that break down dead organic material and wastes.
Decomposers are sometimes considered their own trophic level. As a group, they eat dead matter and waste products that come from organisms at various other trophic levels (for instance, they would happily consume decaying plant matter, the body of a half-eaten squirrel, and the remains of a deceased eagle). In this sense, the decomposer level kind of runs in parallel to the standard hierarchy of primary, secondary, and tertiary consumers.
Fungi and bacteria are the key decomposers in many ecosystems, using the chemical energy in dead matter and wastes to fuel their metabolic processes. Other decomposers are detritivores (detritus- or debris-eaters). These are usually multicellular animals such as earthworms, crabs, slugs, vultures, etc. They not only feed on dead organic matter, but often fragment it as well, making it more available for bacterial or fungal decomposers.
Decomposers as a group play a critical role in keeping ecosystems healthy. When they break down dead material and wastes, they release nutrients that can be recycled and used as building blocks by primary producers.
Food chains give us a clear-cut picture of who eats who. However, some problems come up when we try and use them to describe whole ecological communities. For instance, an organism can sometimes eat multiple types of prey, or be eaten by multiple predators, including ones at different trophic levels. This happens, for instance, when you eat a hamburger patty (cow = primary consumer) with a lettuce leaf on it (lettuce = primary producer).
To represent these relationships more accurately, we can use a food web, a graph that shows all the trophic (eating-related) interactions between various species in an ecosystem. The diagram below shows an example of a food web from Lake Ontario. Primary producers are marked in green, primary consumers in orange, secondary consumers in blue, and tertiary consumers in purple.
In food webs, arrows point from an organism that is eaten to the organism that eats it. As the food web above shows, some species can eat organisms from more than one trophic level. For example, opossum shrimp eat both primary producers and primary consumers.
Bonus question: This food web contains the food chain we saw earlier in the article (green algae → mollusks → slimy sculpin → salmon). Can you find it?
Food webs don't usually show decomposers (for instance, the Lake Ontario food web above does not). Yet, all ecosystems need ways to recycle dead material and wastes. That means decomposers are indeed present, even if they don't get much air time.
For example, in the meadow ecosystem shown below, there is a grazing food web of plants and animals that provides inputs for a detrital food web of bacteria, fungi, and detritovores. The detrital web is shown in simplified form in the brown band across the bottom of the diagram. In reality, it would consist of various species linked by specific feeding interactions (that is, connected by arrows, as in the grazing food web aboveground). Detrital food webs can contribute energy to grazing food webs, as when a robin eats an earthworm.
Energy is transferred between trophic levels when one organism eats another and gets the energy-rich molecules from its prey's body. However, these transfers are inefficient, and this inefficiency limits the length of food chains.
When energy enters a trophic level, some of it is stored as biomass (as part of organisms' bodies). This is the energy that's available to the next trophic level, since only energy stored as biomass can get eaten. As a rule of thumb, only about 10% of the energy that's stored as biomass in one trophic level (per unit time) ends up stored as biomass in the next trophic level (per the same unit time). This 10% rule of energy transfer is a good thing to commit to memory.
As an example, let's suppose the primary producers of an ecosystem store 20, 000 kcal/m2/year of energy as biomass. This is also the amount of energy per year that's made available to the primary consumers, which eat the primary producers. The 10% rule would predict that the primary consumers store only 2, 000 kcal/m2/year of energy in their own bodies, making energy available to their predators (secondary consumers) at a lower rate.
This pattern of fractional transfer limits the length of food chains: after a certain number of trophic levels (generally, 3 - 6 ), there is too little energy flow to support a population at a higher level.
Why does so much energy exit the food web between one trophic level and the next? Here are a few of the main reasons for inefficient energy transfer1,2 :
•In each trophic level, a significant amount of energy is dissipated as heat, as organisms carry out cellular respiration and go about their daily lives.
Nov 21, 2023 · Producers are also called autotrophs. Auto means self, while troph means food. They are organisms that create their food from inorganic molecules such as water, CO2, nitrogen, and phosphate. Most ...
- 3 min
- What is a consumer in ecosystem?A consumer is an organism that cannot produce its own food but needs to eat plants or animals to obtain its energy. Some examples are dogs, fish, e...
- What is the role of a producer in an ecosystem?A producer is a plant or algae that can produce food for itself using the energy from the sun or chemicals found in the ocean. They are important b...
- What are 3 examples of a producer?Producers are plants or bacteria that can make their own food. Some examples of this are grass, trees, lichens, bushes, algae, and kelp.
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Mar 24, 2024 · A food chain refers to the sequence of events in an ecosystem in which one living organism consumes another, which is then consumed by a larger organism. A food chain is the movement of nutrients and energy from one creature to another at different trophic levels. A food chain describes which organisms consume which others in the environment.
Jan 18, 2024 · In the Lake Ontario food chain shown in Figure 26.2.1 26.2. 1, the Chinook salmon is the apex consumer at the top of this food chain. Figure 26.2.1 26.2. 1: These are the trophic levels of a food chain in Lake Ontario at the United States-Canada border. Trophic levels with green algae as the primary producer, mollusks and snails are the primary ...
In ecology, a food chain is a linear sequence of organisms through which nutrients and energy pass: primary producers, primary consumers, and higher-level consumers are used to describe ecosystem structure and dynamics. There is a single path through the chain. Each organism in a food chain occupies what is called a trophic level. Depending on ...
A food chain is a linear sequence of organisms through which nutrients and energy pass as one organism eats another. Each organism in a food chain occupies a specific trophic level (energy level), its position in the food chain. The first trophic level in the food chain is the producers.
