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The first known animal welfare statutes in North America - regulations against “Tirranny or Crueltie” toward domestic animals - are included in the Massachusetts Body of Liberties. [5] 1828: New York passes the first state law against animal cruelty. [6] 1830s onward: Newspapers carry articles reporting and denouncing cruelty towards ...
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 ...
In the simplest scheme, the first trophic level (level 1) is plants, then herbivores (level 2), and then carnivores (level 3). The trophic level equals one more than the chain length, which is the number of links connecting to the base. The base of the food chain (primary producers or detritivores) is set at zero.
Top-down control, therefore, refers to situations where the abundance, diversity or biomass of lower trophic levels depends on effects from consumers at higher trophic levels. [10] A trophic cascade is a type of top-down interaction that describes the indirect effects of predators. In a trophic cascade, predators induce effects that cascade ...
Trophic cascades are powerful indirect interactions that can control entire ecosystems, occurring when a trophic level in a food web is suppressed. For example, a top-down cascade will occur if predators are effective enough in predation to reduce the abundance, or alter the behavior of their prey, thereby releasing the next lower trophic level from predation (or herbivory if the intermediate ...
A foundation species can occupy any trophic level in a food web (i.e., they can be primary producers, herbivores or predators). The term was coined by Paul K. Dayton in 1972, [2] who applied it to certain members of marine invertebrate and algae communities. It was clear from studies in several locations that there were a small handful of ...
The first known animal welfare laws in North America were regulations against "Tirranny or Crueltie" toward domestic animals included in the 1641 Massachusetts Body of Liberties. [2] Starting in the late 1820s, a number of states passed anti-cruelty statutes.
One of the first national laws to protect animals was the UK Cruelty to Animals Act 1835 followed by the Protection of Animals Act 1911. In the US it was many years until there was a national law to protect animals—the Animal Welfare Act of 1966—although there were a number of states that passed anti-cruelty laws between 1828 and 1898. [22]