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In a detrital web, plant and animal matter is broken down by decomposers, e.g., bacteria and fungi, and moves to detritivores and then carnivores. [69] There are often relationships between the detrital web and the grazing web. Mushrooms produced by decomposers in the detrital web become a food source for deer, squirrels, and mice in the ...
Complex food webs may be more stable if the interaction strengths are weak [22] and soil food webs appear to consist of many weak interactions and a few strong ones. [21] Donor controlled food webs may be inherently more stable, because it is difficult for primary consumers to overtax their resources. [25]
Consumer–resource interactions are the core motif of ecological food chains or food webs, [1] and are an umbrella term for a variety of more specialized types of biological species interactions including prey-predator (see predation), host-parasite (see parasitism), plant-herbivore and victim-exploiter systems.
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 ...
Horse feces and straw are forms of detritus, and are used as manure. In biology, detritus (/ d ɪ ˈ t r aɪ t ə s / or / d ɛ ˈ t r ɪ t ə s /) is organic matter made up of the decomposing remains of organisms and plants, and also of feces. Detritus usually hosts communities of microorganisms that colonize and decompose (remineralise) it.
Detritivores capitalize upon this energy source, creating an alternate and parallel food web of potentially large importance. This is because carbon fixation into the detrital food web is not limited by stratification, turbidity or day length, all of which limit photosynthesis. Detrital production occurs continuously, limited only by inputs and ...
Connectance: the proportion of possible links between species that are realized (links/species 2). In food webs, the level of connectance is related to the statistical distribution of the links per species. The distribution of links changes from (partial) power-law to exponential to uniform as the level of connectance increases. [3]
The aquatic microbial loop is a marine trophic pathway which incorporates dissolved organic carbon into the food chain.. The microbial loop describes a trophic pathway where, in aquatic systems, dissolved organic carbon (DOC) is returned to higher trophic levels via its incorporation into bacterial biomass, and then coupled with the classic food chain formed by phytoplankton-zooplankton-nekton.