A Terrestrial food chain Is a series of organisms that eat each other so that energy and nutrients flow from one to another.
And it is that these organisms can compete, be symbionts, long-term partners with a close association or, of course, one of them can eat the other one a bit! That is, they can form one of the links in a food chain.
It is not always possible to describe fully what an organism - like a human - eats with a linear pathway. For some situations, you may want to use a food web consisting of many food chains that intersect and represent the different things that an organism can eat and be eaten by.
A food chain shows the feeding relationship between different living things in a particular environment or habitat. Often, a plant will start a food chain because it can make its own food using energy from the sun.
In addition, a food chain represents a series of events in which food and energy are transferred from one organism in one ecosystem to another.
Food chains show how energy is transmitted from the sun to producers, from producers to consumers and from consumers to decomposers.
Example of a simple food chain / Photo retrieved from: e-ducativa.catedu.es.
You may also be interested in Aquatic Food Chain: Levels and Organisms .
Types of roles that make up the food chain
The producers
Producers are the beginning of a simple food chain. Producers are plants and vegetables. The plants are at the beginning of every food chain that involves the Sun.
All energy comes from the Sun and plants are the ones that make food with that energy. They use the process of photosynthesis . Plants also make a lot of other nutrients for other organisms.
There's also Photosynthetic protists Which begin the food chains. They are found floating on the surface of the ocean, acting as food for small unicellular animals.
The consumers
The consumers Are the next link in a food chain. There are three levels of consumers.
Levels begin with organisms that eat plants. Scientists named this first group of organisms as the main consumers.
Horses qualify as primary consumers as they feed on grass.
They are also called herbivores. They are the plant-eaters of the chain. It could be a squirrel or it could be a moose. He will be out there eating plants and fruits. He will not eat animals.
Secondary consumers eat the primary consumers. A mouse could be a primary consumer and a cat could be the secondary one. Secondary consumers are also called carnivores.
In some Ecosystems , There is a third level of consumer called the tertiary consumer (which means third level). These are the consumers who eat the secondary and primary consumers. A tertiary consumer might be a wolf that eats the cat or the mouse.
There are also consumers called omnivores. Omnivores can be secondary or tertiary consumers. Humans and bears are considered omnivores: we eat meat, plants, and almost anything.
The decomposers
The last links of the chain are the decomposers. They consume organic matter"dead", that is to say in decomposition. Decomposers break down nutrients into"dead matter"and return it to the soil.
Producers can use nutrients and elements once they are on the ground. The decomposers complete the system, returning essential molecules to the producers.
They are organisms that decompose large molecules of dead organisms into small molecules and return important materials to the environment.
Sooner or later, all living things die. When a plant or animal dies, its body begins to decompose into small pieces.
Special living beings called decomposers break down the body. A decomposer transforms the dead matter into chemicals and then the chemicals go into the air, into the ground or into the water and are used again.
Examples of decomposers are: earthworms, molds, fungi, bacteria and fungi.
Food Networks
The food chains Give a clear picture of who eats whom. However, some problems arise when using them to describe whole ecological communities.
For example, an organism can sometimes eat multiple types of prey or be eaten by several predators, including those of different trophic levels. This is what happens when someone eats a hamburger. The cow is a primary consumer, and lettuce leaf is a primary producer.
To represent these relationships more accurately, we can use a food web, a graph that shows all interactions related to trophic eating among several species in an ecosystem.
The following diagram shows an example of a Lake Ontario food network. Primary producers are marked in green, primary consumers in orange, secondary consumers in blue and tertiary consumers in purple.
Lake Ontario Food Network / Photo retrieved from: khanacademy.org.
Importance of food chains
Food chains are the living components of biosphere . These are energy transfer vehicles from one level to another. Through the food chains also the transfer of materials and nutrients takes place.
Thus, a food chain is a picture of organisms in an ecological community that are linked together through the transfer of energy and nutrients, starting with an autotrophic organism as a plant and continuing with each organism being consumed by a higher one in the chain.
A food chain also shows how organisms are related to each other by the food they eat.
All living things depend on food to survive. Energy is necessary for the biotic world to grow and sustain itself. A food chain describes the method in which a particular organism collects its food.
It is an arrangement of who eats whom in a biological community or an ecosystem to obtain food.
A food chain is a way of representing the energy flow of one organism to the next and the next and so on. Everyone needs the energy transmitted through a food chain to survive.
References
- Rader, A. (2015). "Another Link in the Food Chain". Retrieved from geography4kids.com.
- EDINformatics editor team. (1999). "What is the food chain". Retrieved from edinformatics.com.
- SoftSchools editor team. (2017). "Food Chains". Recovered from softschools.com.
- Benke, A. (2010). "Secondary Production."Nature Education Knowledge 3. Retrieved from nature.com.
- KidPort Reference Library Publisher Team. (2012). "Food Chain". Retrieved from kidport.com.
- Team editor of School Today. (2017). "Food Chains". Retrieved from eschooltoday.com.
- Abedon, S. (2016). "Trophic Efficiency"Biology As Poetry. Retrieved from biologyaspoetry.com.