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A consumer in a food chain is a living creature that eats organisms from a different population. A consumer is a heterotroph and a producer is an autotroph.Like sea angels, they take in organic moles by consuming other organisms, so they are commonly called consumers.
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 ...
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.
Cell biology; Cellular microbiology ... defined to only include consumption of primary producers by herbivorous consumers ... is defined as the difference between ...
In the case of marine ecosystems, the trophic level of most fish and other marine consumers takes a value between 2.0 and 5.0. The upper value, 5.0, is unusual, even for large fish, [ 16 ] though it occurs in apex predators of marine mammals, such as polar bears and orcas.
Although this topic is highly debated, researchers have attributed the distinction in herbivore control to several theories, including producer to consumer size ratios and herbivore selectivity. [7] A freshwater food web demonstrating the size differences between each trophic level. Primary producers tend to be small algal cells.
In the food chain, heterotrophs are primary, secondary and tertiary consumers, but not producers. [3] [4] Living organisms that are heterotrophic include all animals and fungi, some bacteria and protists, [5] and many parasitic plants.
The framework centers around "consumer-resource models" which largely split a given ecosystem into resources (e.g. sunlight or available water in soil) and consumers (e.g. any living thing, including plants and animals), and attempts to define the scope of possible relationships that could exist between the two groups.