Each food chain is a possible route that energy and nutrients can follow through the ecosystem. For example, grass produces its own food from sunlight. A food chain is a sequence of organisms through which nutrients and energy are transferred in the form of food from one organism to another. The food chain describes who eats whom to survive in an ecosystem.
The food chain is also the route for energy transfer in an ecosystem. Energy is produced by “producers” and transferred to “consumers” and then to “decomposers”. Each step or level of the food chain forms a trophic level. Autotrophs or producers are the first at the trophic level.
From then on, primary consumers and secondary consumers continue. The last trophic level is that of decomposers. These tropic levels help us understand the food chain and the transfer of energy at various trophic levels. Energy transfer occurs at all trophic levels.
In a terrestrial ecosystem, green plants capture approximately 1% of the energy from sunlight that falls on their leaves and convert it into food energy. Thereafter, energy is further transferred to each trophic level. However, at each trophic level, there is a loss of energy in the form of heat to the environment. The food chain is one of the most interesting topics in science and explains how all living beings are connected to each other in an ecosystem.
It is usually introduced in Science class 3 and students can explore it in detail until class 9. In addition to the school context, it is an intriguing concept in and of itself and is also presented in several competitive exams. This blog aims to give more details about what a food chain and a food network are together with their diagrams and examples. Now that you are familiar with what the food chain is at the trophic level, let's understand Food Web.
The complex organization of organisms in the ecosystem results in interconnected food chains. Whenever there are large chains interconnected, they form a food web. A food web always represents the flow of energy, as well as energy, consumed on a broader level by any organism in the ecosystem. Often, many predators eat a single organism, or several organisms are eaten by a single animal.
In this situation, you are incompetent to show the exact energy flow, since there are several levels of energy that are interconnected. In this case, a food network would be a better solution for interpreting energy flow. For example, a frog eats a fly and then eats it by a larger animal. The detritus food chain includes dead organic matter.
It includes species of organisms and plants such as algae, bacteria, fungi, protozoa, mites, insects, worms, etc. In this food chain, dead organic matter from plants and animals is degraded by decomposers and detritivores, which are then ingested by smaller organisms, such as carnivores. Examples of carnivores are worms, frogs, snakes and more, while detritivores are fungi, bacteria or protozoa that feed on detritus. For example, dead organic waste is consumed by microscopic organisms such as bacteria or fungi.
It starts with autotrophs, which include green plants, goes through herbivores and then carnivores. In this one, the energy of the lowest trophic level is acquired from photosynthesis. There are two types of grazing food chains. The first is a chain of predators in which one animal consumes another animal.
The animal that is eaten is known as prey and the animal that eats is called a predator. Second, it's the parasitic chain: plants and animals in a grazing food chain are infected by parasites. For example, zooplanktons eat phytoplankton, fish eat zooplankton, and small fish eat big fish. A consumer of a food chain is a living being that eats organisms from a different population.
A consumer is also referred to as a heterotroph. Consumers are usually predatory animals, such as carnivores, but also herbivorous consumers who eat plants. For example, both a tiger and a deer are consumers. Organisms that feed on producers are called primary consumers.
There are many major consumers, and they are usually small in size. The main consumers are herbivores or vegetarians. For example, rabbits, grasshoppers, giraffes, vegetarian humans, etc. Organisms that feed on primary consumers are called secondary consumers of energy and proteins.
Secondary consumers can be both carnivores and omnivores. They can range from small animals to large predators. Organisms that feed on primary and secondary consumers are called tertiary consumers of energy and proteins. For example, tigers, lions, humans, etc.
We often find animals that consume dead and decaying matter; these chains that begin when the consumer eats dead organic matter are known as the detritus food chain (DFC). To meet their energy requirements, decomposers, such as fungi and bacteria, feed on dead, inorganic matter. The food chain is a linear sequence of organisms in which nutrients and energy are transferred from one organism to another. By eating and excreting, decomposers return nutrients from dead organisms to the soil, nourishing plants that start the chains again.
The trophic level refers to the sequential stages of a food chain, starting with producers at the bottom, followed by primary, secondary and tertiary consumers. Since the loss of energy is enormous at every step, food chains generally consist of only three or four steps. The food chain can be broadly classified into two types, namely, “detritus food chain” and “grazing food chain”. A food chain refers to the order of events in an ecosystem, where a living organism eats another organism and, later, that organism is consumed by another larger organism.
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. Much of the ocean remains unexplored, and food chains in water-based environments are often complex and surprise us Earth's inhabitants. In a food chain, an organism eats a single item, while in a food web, an organism consumes several items. A variety of food chains are intertwined to form a food web, which is the largest and most complex form of energy transfer sequence.
In technical terms, the food chain is the sequence through which energy transfer takes place within a particular ecosystem. The main source of food in the food chain are plants, since they use solar energy to produce food through the process of photosynthesis. 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. .
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