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A consumer in a food chain is a living creature that eats organisms from a different population. ... Primary consumers are herbivores, feeding on plants or algae ...
All organisms in a food chain, except the first organism, are consumers. Secondary consumers eat and obtain energy from primary consumers, tertiary consumers eat and obtain energy from secondary consumers, etc. At the highest trophic level is typically an apex predator, a consumer with no natural predators in the food chain model.
The three basic ways in which organisms get food are as producers, consumers, and decomposers. Producers are typically plants or algae. Plants and algae do not usually eat other organisms, but pull nutrients from the soil or the ocean and manufacture their own food using photosynthesis. For this reason, they are called primary producers
Herbivory is a form of consumption in which an organism principally eats autotrophs [6] such as plants, algae and photosynthesizing bacteria. More generally, organisms that feed on autotrophs in general are known as primary consumers. Herbivory is usually limited to animals that eat plants.
In some ecosystems, there can be more primary consumers than producers. A pyramid of numbers graphically shows the population, or abundance, in terms of the number of individual organisms involved at each level in a food chain. This shows the number of organisms in each trophic level without considering their individual sizes or biomass.
[51] [52] [53] Mineral nutrients are the material resources that organisms need for growth, development, and vitality. Food webs depict the pathways of mineral nutrient cycling as they flow through organisms. [6] [18] Most of the primary production in an ecosystem is not consumed, but is recycled by detritus back into useful nutrients. [54]
At the base of the ocean food web are single-celled algae and other plant-like organisms known as phytoplankton. The second trophic level (primary consumers) is occupied by zooplankton which feed off the phytoplankton. Higher order consumers complete the web. There has been increasing recognition in recent years that marine microorganisms.
A top-down cascade is a trophic cascade where the top consumer/predator controls the primary consumer population. In turn, the primary producer population thrives. The removal of the top predator can alter the food web dynamics. In this case, the primary consumers would overpopulate and exploit the primary producers. Eventually there would not ...