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Of all the net primary productivity at the producer trophic level, in general only 10% goes to the next level, the primary consumers, then only 10% of that 10% goes on to the next trophic level, and so on up the food pyramid. [1] Ecological efficiency may be anywhere from 5% to 20% depending on how efficient or inefficient that ecosystem is.
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.
A trophic cascade can occur in a food web if a trophic level in the web is suppressed. For example, a top-down cascade can 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
Thus, the net production at one trophic level is / / / = / or approximately ten percent that of the trophic level before it. For example, assume 500 units of energy are produced by trophic level 1. One half of that is lost to non-predatory death, while the other half (250 units) is ingested by trophic level 2.
A pyramid of biomass shows the relationship between biomass and trophic level by quantifying the biomass present at each trophic level of an ecological community at a particular time. It is a graphical representation of biomass (total amount of living or organic matter in an ecosystem) present in unit area in different trophic levels.
Tritrophic interactions in plant defense against herbivory describe the ecological impacts of three trophic levels on each other: the plant, the herbivore, and its natural enemies. They may also be called multitrophic interactions when further trophic levels, such as soil microbes, endophytes, or hyperparasitoids (higher-order predators) are ...
The mean trophic level is calculated by assigning each fish or invertebrate species a number based on its trophic level.The trophic level is a measure of the position of an organism in a food web, starting at level 1 with primary producers, such as phytoplankton and seaweed, then moving through the primary consumers at level 2 that eat the primary producers to the secondary consumers at level ...