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This regeneration cycle is known as the microbial loop [16] and is a key component of lentic food webs. [2] The decomposition of organic materials can continue in the benthic and profundal zones if the matter falls through the water column before being completely digested by the pelagic bacteria.
NOAA Great Lakes Food Web Diagrams direct Author NOAA, Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory: Mason, Krause, and Ulanowicz, 2002 - Modifications for Lake Ontario, 2009.
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.
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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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.