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The trophic level of an organism is the number of steps it is from the start of the chain. A food web starts at trophic level 1 with primary producers such as plants, can move to herbivores at level 2, carnivores at level 3 or higher, and typically finish with apex predators at level 4 or 5. The path along the chain can form either a one-way ...
The unidirectional flow of energy and the successive loss of energy as it travels up the food web are patterns in energy flow that are governed by thermodynamics, which is the theory of energy exchange between systems. [4] [5] Trophic dynamics relates to thermodynamics because it deals with the transfer and transformation of energy (originating ...
Links in a food-web illustrate direct trophic relations among species, but there are also indirect effects that can alter the abundance, distribution, or biomass in the trophic levels. For example, predators eating herbivores indirectly influence the control and regulation of primary production in plants.
Trophic coherence: The tendency of species to specialise on particular trophic levels leads to food webs displaying a significant degree of order in their trophic structure, known as trophic coherence, [22] which in turn has important effects on properties such as stability and prevalence of cycles.
Food chain in a Swedish lake. Osprey feed on northern pike, which in turn feed on perch which eat bleak which eat crustaceans.. A food chain is a linear network of links in a food web, often starting with an autotroph (such as grass or algae), also called a producer, and typically ending at an apex predator (such as grizzly bears or killer whales), detritivore (such as earthworms and woodlice ...
A food chain is a linear system of links that is part of a food web, and represents the order in which organisms are consumed from one trophic level to the next. Each link in a food chain is associated with a trophic level in the ecosystem.
Trophic species have identical prey and a shared set of predators in the food web. This means that members of a trophic species share many of the same kinds of ecological functions. [1] [2] The idea of trophic species was first devised by Frederic Briand and Joel Cohen in 1984 when investigating scaling laws applying to food webs. [3]
Only 1 to 2 percent of the energy from the sun is absorbed by photosynthetic processes and converted into food. [1] When energy is transferred to higher trophic levels, on average only about 10% is used at each level to build biomass, becoming stored energy. The rest goes to metabolic processes such as growth, respiration, and reproduction. [2]