Food chains were first introduced by the Arab scientist and philosopher Al-Jahiz in the tenth century and were later popularized in a book published in 1927 by Charles Elton, who also introduced the concept of a food web. The food chain describes who eats whom in nature. All living things, from single-celled algae to giant blue whales, need food to survive. 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. When the fox dies, bacteria break down its body and return it to the soil, where it provides nutrients to plants such as grass. Of course, many different animals eat grass, and rabbits can eat other plants besides grass. Foxes, in turn, can eat many types of animals and plants.
Each of these living beings can be part of multiple food chains. All the interconnected and overlapping food chains of an ecosystem form a food web. Trophic levels Organisms in food chains are grouped into categories called trophic levels. Broadly speaking, these levels are divided into producers (first trophic level), consumers (second, third and fourth trophic levels) and decomposers.
Producers, also known as autotrophs, make their own food. They constitute the first level of every food chain. Autotrophs are usually single-celled plants or organisms. Nearly all autotrophs use a process called photosynthesis to create “food” (a nutrient called glucose) from sunlight, carbon dioxide and water.
Plants are the most familiar type of autotroph, but there are many other types. Algae, whose larger forms are known as seaweed, are autotrophic. Phytoplankton, small organisms that live in the ocean, are also autotrophic. Some types of bacteria are autotrophic.
For example, bacteria that live in active volcanoes use sulfur compounds to produce their own food. This process is called chemosynthesis. The second trophic level is made up of organisms that feed on producers. These are called primary consumers or herbivores.
Deer, turtles, and many types of birds are herbivorous. Tertiary consumers eat secondary consumers. There may be more levels of consumers before a chain finally reaches its main predator. The main predators, also called supreme predators, feed on other consumers.
Consumers can be carnivores (animals that feed on other animals) or omnivores (animals that feed on both plants and animals). Omnivores, like people, consume many types of food. People eat plants, such as vegetables and fruits. We also eat animals and animal products, such as meat, milk and eggs.
We eat mushrooms, like mushrooms. We also eat seaweed in edible seaweed such as nori (used to wrap sushi rolls) and sea lettuce (used in salads). Detritivores and decomposers are the final part of food chains. Detritivores are organisms that feed on the remains of non-living plants and animals.
For example, scavengers, such as vultures, eat dead animals. Dung beetles eat animal feces, decomposers such as fungi and bacteria complete the food chain. They convert organic waste, such as decaying plants, into inorganic materials, such as nutrient-rich soils. Decomposers complete the life cycle and return nutrients to the soil or oceans for use by autotrophs.
This starts a whole new food chain. The intermediate levels are full of omnivores that feed on more than one trophic level and cause energy to flow through several food pathways starting from a basal species. However, energy pyramids will always have the shape of a vertical pyramid if all sources of food energy are included, and this is dictated by the second law of thermodynamics. Food chains are linear (not cyclical) food pathways that track monophagous consumers from a base species to the main consumer, who is usually a larger predatory carnivore.
The links in a food web illustrate feeding pathways, for example, when heterotrophs obtain organic matter by feeding on autotrophs and other heterotrophs. The second consumer (trophic level) in the desert food web includes birds and scorpions, and the tertiary consumers that make up the fourth trophic level include birds, predators, and foxes. However, recent studies have shown that the food webs of a wide range of terrestrial, freshwater and marine communities share a remarkable list of patterns. A food web diagram illustrating the composition of species shows how change in a single species can directly and indirectly influence many others.
The laws of scaling, for example, predict a relationship between the topology of the food web, the links between predators and prey, and levels of species richness. As a diagramming tool, the food web has been approved to be effective in illustrating species interactions and testing research hypotheses. The fundamental purpose of food webs is to describe the feeding relationship between species in a community. The food web is a simplified illustration of the various feeding methods that link an ecosystem to a unified system of exchange.
In general, there are a maximum of four or five links in a food chain, although food chains in aquatic ecosystems are usually longer than terrestrial food chains. In a marine food chain, single-celled organisms called phytoplankton provide food for small shrimp called krill. For example, human food webs, agricultural food nets, detrital food nets, marine food nets, aquatic food nets, soil food nets, arctic (or polar) food nets, terrestrial food webs, and microbial food nets. All species in food webs can be distinguished into basal species (autotrophic, such as plants), intermediate species (herbivores and intermediate-level carnivores, such as grasshoppers and scorpions) or major predators (high-level carnivores, such as foxes) (Figure.
Common examples of an aggregated node in a food web may include parasites, microbes, decomposers, saprotrophs, consumers, or predators, each of which contains many species in a network that could otherwise be connected to other trophic species. . .
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