A food chain shows how every living thing obtains its food. Some animals eat plants and some animals eat other animals. For example, a simple food chain links trees and shrubs, giraffes (which feed on trees and shrubs) and lions (who eat giraffes). Each link in this chain is food for the next link.
It starts with the primary source, such as the sun or hydrothermal vents, where producers produce food, continues with consumers or animals that feed on food, and ends with the main predator. By eating and excreting, decomposers return nutrients from dead organisms to the soil, nourishing plants that start the chains again. There, microbes that never saw the sun extracted nutrients from compounds emitted into water from deep in the Earth's crust and produced chemicals that created entirely new food webs that had never been dreamed of on the surface. Decomposers also play a crucial role in this case, since aquatic decomposers distribute nutrients not only in the soil, but throughout the water column, feeding the plankton that form the basis of all aquatic food chains.
Ultimately, everything gets its energy from the Sun, and most food chains follow the pattern of herbivores, carnivores, perhaps one or two carnivores, supreme predators. Food chains are the basic unit of any ecosystem and are connected together to form food networks that map the interactions of life on Earth. Organisms ranging from bacteria and worms to the noble cockroach feed on the dead and, in doing so, break them down into the nutrients that keep the food chain running. The term food chain refers to the sequence of events in an ecosystem, where one organism eats another and is then eaten by another organism.
A) The sequence of living organisms in a community in which one organism consumes another organism to transfer food energy is called the food chain. Much of the ocean remains unexplored, and food chains in water-based environments are often complex and surprising to Earth's inhabitants. Grass (producer) Deer (herbivore) Lion (carnivore) (b) Interconnected food chains that operate in an ecosystem and that establish a network of relationships between several species form a food web.
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