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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.
Decomposers are often left off food webs, but if included, they mark the end of a food chain. [6] Thus food chains start with primary producers and end with decay and decomposers. Since decomposers recycle nutrients, leaving them so they can be reused by primary producers, they are sometimes regarded as occupying their own trophic level.
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 ...
Freshwater ecosystem. Freshwater ecosystems are a subset of Earth's aquatic ecosystems that include the biological communities inhabiting freshwater waterbodies such as lakes, ponds, rivers, streams, springs, bogs, and wetlands. [1] They can be contrasted with marine ecosystems, which have a much higher salinity. Freshwater habitats can be ...
In order to more efficiently show the quantity of organisms at each trophic level, these food chains are then organized into trophic pyramids. [1] The arrows in the food chain show that the energy flow is unidirectional, with the head of an arrow indicating the direction of energy flow; energy is lost as heat at each step along the way. [2] [3]
Freshwater invertebrates include freshwater mollusks, insects, crustaceans, and worms. [9] Freshwater invertebrates provide an important link in freshwater food chains, transporting the nutrients and energy from producers such as algae and aquatic plants to higher consumers such as fish and amphibians. [9]
The microbial food web refers to the combined trophic interactions among microbes in aquatic environments. These microbes include viruses , bacteria , algae , heterotrophic protists (such as ciliates and flagellates ). [ 1 ]
Algae contributes to a lot of the energy and nutrients at the base of the food chain along with terrestrial litter-fall that enters the stream or river. [34] Production of organic compounds like carbon is what gets transferred up the food chain. Primary producers are consumed by herbivorous invertebrates that act as the primary consumers ...