Length įood chains are directional paths of trophic energy or, equivalently, sequences of links that start with basal species, such as producers or fine organic matter, and end with consumer organisms. įood chains were first introduced by the Arab scientist and philosopher Al-Jahiz in the 10th century and later popularized in a book published in 1927 by Charles Elton, which also introduced the food web concept. Keystone species keep herbivores from depleting all of the foliage in their environment and preventing mass extinction. If this keystone species dies off it can set the entire food chain off balance. A keystone species is a species that has a large impact on the surrounding environment and can directly affect the food chain. It is estimated that there are more than 100,000 different decomposers in existence. These are the simple nutrients that plants require to create organic compounds. Even so, it has recently been discovered that there are some forms of life, chemotrophs, that appear to gain all their metabolic energy from chemosynthesis driven by hydrothermal vents, thus showing that some life may not require solar energy to thrive.ĭecomposers, which feed on dead animals, break down the organic compounds into simple nutrients that are returned to the soil. Because the sun's light is necessary for photosynthesis, most life could not exist if the sun disappeared. Primary producers, or autotrophs, utilize energy derived from either sunlight or inorganic chemical compounds to create complex organic compounds, whereas species at higher trophic levels cannot and so must consume producers or other life that itself consumes producers. The foundation of the food chain consists of primary producers. When only one element is removed from the food chain it can result in extinction of a species in some cases. The snail might then be the prey of a secondary consumer such as a frog, which itself may be eaten by a tertiary consumer such as a snake which in turn may be consumed by an eagle.įood chains are very important for the survival of most species. For example, a food chain might start with a green plant as the producer, which is eaten by a snail, the primary consumer. The tertiary consumers may sometimes become prey to the top predators known as the quaternary consumers. The primary consumer may be eaten by a secondary consumer, which in turn may be consumed by a tertiary consumer. The food chain begins with a producer, which is eaten by a primary consumer. The food chain is an energy source diagram. The mean chain length of an entire web is the arithmetic average of the lengths of all chains in the food web. In its simplest form, the length of a chain is the number of links between a trophic consumer and the base of the web. Natural interconnections between food chains make it a food web.Ī common metric used to quantify food web trophic structure is food chain length. A food chain differs from a food web because the complex network of different animals' feeding relations are aggregated and the chain only follows a direct, linear pathway of one animal at a time. Each level of a food chain represents a different trophic level. A food chain also shows how organisms are related to each other by the food they eat. Osprey feed on northern pike, which in turn feed on perch which eat bleak which eat crustaceansĪ food chain is a linear network of links in a food web starting from producer organisms (such as grass or algaes which produce their own food via photosynthesis) and ending at an apex predator species (like grizzly bears or killer whales), detritivores (like earthworms or woodlice), or decomposer species (such as fungi or bacteria).
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