Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
[7] 100×10 15 grams of carbon/year fixed by photosynthetic organisms, which is equivalent to 4×10 18 kJ/yr = 4×10 21 J/yr of free energy. Cellular respiration is the reverse reaction, wherein energy of plants is taken in and carbon dioxide and water are given off. The carbon dioxide and water produced can be recycled back into plants.
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.
"High school physics textbooks" (PDF). Reports on high school physics. American Institute of Physics; Zitzewitz, Paul W. (2005). Physics: principles and problems. New York: Glencoe/McGraw-Hill. ISBN 978-0078458132
An example of a topological food web (image courtesy of USDA) [1]. The soil food web is the community of organisms living all or part of their lives in the soil. It describes a complex living system in the soil and how it interacts with the environment, plants, and animals.
The observed values of connectance in empirical food webs appear to be constrained by the variability of the physical environment, [4] by habitat type, [5] which will reflect on an organism's diet breadth driven by optimal foraging behaviour. This ultimately links the structure of these ecological networks to the behaviour of individual organisms.
Within a food web, a food chain is a succession of organisms that eat other organisms and may, in turn, be eaten themselves. 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 ...
Only 1 to 2 percent of the energy from the sun is absorbed by photosynthetic processes and converted into food. [1] When energy is transferred to higher trophic levels, on average only about 10% is used at each level to build biomass, becoming stored energy. The rest goes to metabolic processes such as growth, respiration, and reproduction. [2]
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 ...