Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
The mean trophic level is calculated by assigning each fish or invertebrate species a number based on its trophic level.The trophic level is a measure of the position of an organism in a food web, starting at level 1 with primary producers, such as phytoplankton and seaweed, then moving through the primary consumers at level 2 that eat the primary producers to the secondary consumers at level ...
Conditional logistic regression is an extension of logistic regression that allows one to account for stratification and matching. Its main field of application is observational studies and in particular epidemiology. It was devised in 1978 by Norman Breslow, Nicholas Day, Katherine Halvorsen, Ross L. Prentice and C. Sabai. [1]
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 ...
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 ...
Food cycle is an obsolete term that is synonymous with food web. Ecologists can broadly group all life forms into one of two trophic layers, the autotrophs and the heterotrophs . Autotrophs produce more biomass energy, either chemically without the sun's energy or by capturing the sun's energy in photosynthesis , than they use during metabolic ...
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] In aquatic ecosystems, microbial food webs are essential because they form the basis for the cycling of nutrients and energy.
Further up the food chain, the concentration of the contaminant increases, sometimes resulting in the top consumer dying. Biomagnification , also known as bioamplification or biological magnification , is the increase in concentration of a substance, e.g a pesticide, in the tissues of organisms at successively higher levels in a food chain . [ 1 ]