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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 ...
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.
Position in the food web, or trophic level, is used in ecology to broadly classify organisms as autotrophs or heterotrophs. This is a non-binary classification; some organisms (such as carnivorous plants ) occupy the role of mixotrophs , or autotrophs that additionally obtain organic matter from non-atmospheric sources.
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.
Higher trophic levels cannot produce their own energy and so must consume producers or other life that itself consumes producers. In the higher trophic levels lies consumers (secondary consumers, tertiary consumers, etc.). Consumers are organisms that eat other organisms. All organisms in a food chain, except the first organism, are consumers.
The definition of the trophic level, TL, for any consumer species is [6] = + (), where is the fractional trophic level of the prey j, and represents the fraction of j in the diet of i. In the case of marine ecosystems, the trophic level of most fish and other marine consumers takes value between 2.0 and 5.0.
Thus, bioconcentration and bioaccumulation occur within an organism, and biomagnification occurs across trophic (food chain) levels. Biodilution is also a process that occurs to all trophic levels in an aquatic environment; it is the opposite of biomagnification, thus when a pollutant gets smaller in concentration as it progresses up a food web ...
Trophic species are a scientific grouping of organisms according to their shared trophic (feeding) positions in a food web or food chain. Trophic species have identical prey and a shared set of predators in the food web. This means that members of a trophic species share many of the same kinds of ecological functions.