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Secondary consumers are small/medium-sized carnivores that prey on herbivorous animals. Omnivores, which feed on both plants and animals, can be considered as being both primary and secondary consumers. Tertiary consumers, which are sometimes also known as apex predators, are hypercarnivorous or omnivorous animals usually at the top of food ...
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 ...
More generally, organisms that feed on autotrophs in general are known as primary consumers. Herbivory is usually limited to animals that eat plants. Insect herbivory can cause a variety of physical and metabolic alterations in the way the host plant interacts with itself and other surrounding biotic factors.
In addition to observational studies of animal behavior, and quantification of animal stomach contents, trophic level can be quantified through stable isotope analysis of animal tissues such as muscle, skin, hair, bone collagen. This is because there is a consistent increase in the nitrogen isotopic composition at each trophic level caused by ...
The number of trophic links per consumer is a measure of food web connectance. Food chains are nested within the trophic links of food webs. Food chains are linear (noncyclic) feeding pathways that trace monophagous consumers from a base species up to the top consumer, which is usually a larger predatory carnivore. [8] [9] [10]
A top-down cascade is a trophic cascade where the top consumer/predator controls the primary consumer population. In turn, the primary producer population thrives. The removal of the top predator can alter the food web dynamics. In this case, the primary consumers would overpopulate and exploit the primary producers. Eventually there would not ...
Because of this inversion, it is the zooplankton that make up most of the marine animal biomass. As primary consumers, zooplankton are the crucial link between the primary producers (mainly phytoplankton) and the rest of the marine food web (secondary consumers); [191] the ocean's primary producers are mostly tiny phytoplankton which have r ...
Consumers are broken down into primary consumers, secondary consumers and tertiary consumers. Carnivores have a much higher assimilation of energy, about 80% and herbivores have a much lower efficiency of approximately 20 to 50%. [16] Energy in a system can be affected by animal emigration/immigration.