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A marine food web is a food web of marine life. ... The upper value, 5.0, is unusual, even for large fish, [7] though it occurs in apex predators of marine mammals, ...
The lion is the world's second-largest big cat and serves as an apex land predator in Africa. [1] [2] The saltwater crocodile is the largest living reptile and the dominant predator throughout its range. [3] [4] The great white shark (bottom) is one of the top marine predators; however, the orca (top) is known to prey upon them. Thus, great ...
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 ...
In his 1966 paper, Food Web Complexity and Species Diversity, Paine had described such a system in Makah Bay in Washington. [4] In his 1969 paper, Paine proposed the keystone species concept, using Pisaster ochraceus, a species of starfish generally known as ochre starfish, and Mytilus californianus, a species of mussel, as a primary example. [1]
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 flow or a part of a wider food "web".
Predatory fish such as sharks, billfish, dolphinfish and tuna form a part of the human diet and are targeted by fisheries, but they tend to concentrate significant quantities of mercury in their bodies because they are high in the food chain, especially as apex predators, due to biomagnification. [6]
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.
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 ...