Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
A food web model is a network of food chains. Each food chain starts with a primary producer or autotroph, an organism, such as an alga or a plant, which is able to manufacture its own food. Next in the chain is an organism that feeds on the primary producer, and the chain continues in this way as a string of successive predators.
Some dinoflagellates are known to be photosynthetic, but a large fraction of these are in fact mixotrophic, combining photosynthesis with ingestion of prey (phagotrophy). [76] Some species are endosymbionts of marine animals and other protists, and play an important part in the biology of coral reefs. Others predate other protozoa, and a few ...
The organisms responsible for primary production are called primary producers or autotrophs. Most marine primary production is generated by a diverse collection of marine microorganisms called algae and cyanobacteria. Together these form the principal primary producers at the base of the ocean food chain and produce half of the world's oxygen ...
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 freshwater aquatic food web. The blue arrows show a complete food chain (algae → daphnia → gizzard shad → largemouth bass → great blue heron). A food web is the natural interconnection of food chains and a graphical representation of what-eats-what in an ecological community.
It is thought that the first organisms on Earth were primary producers located on the ocean floor. [3] Autotrophs are fundamental to the food chains of all ecosystems in the world. They take energy from the environment in the form of sunlight or inorganic chemicals and use it to create fuel molecules such as carbohydrates.
In order to more efficiently show the quantity of organisms at each trophic level, these food chains are then organized into trophic pyramids. [1] The arrows in the food chain show that the energy flow is unidirectional, with the head of an arrow indicating the direction of energy flow; energy is lost as heat at each step along the way. [2] [3]
The tiny (0.6 μm) marine cyanobacterium Prochlorococcus, discovered in 1986, forms today an important part of the base of the ocean food chain and accounts for much of the photosynthesis of the open ocean [84] and an estimated 20% of the oxygen in the Earth's atmosphere. [85]