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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 ...
The base or basal species in a food web are those species without prey and can include autotrophs or saprophytic detritivores (i.e., the community of decomposers in soil, biofilms, and periphyton). Feeding connections in the web are called trophic links. The number of trophic links per consumer is a measure of food web connectance.
Here primary producers manufacture food through a process called chemosynthesis. [5] Consumers (heterotrophs) are species that cannot manufacture their own food and need to consume other organisms. Animals that eat primary producers (like plants) are called herbivores.
[4] [5] For example, a large marine vertebrate may eat smaller predatory fish but may also eat filter feeders; the stingray eats crustaceans, but the hammerhead eats both crustaceans and stingrays. Animals can also eat each other; the cod eats smaller cod as well as crayfish, and crayfish eat cod larvae. The feeding habits of a juvenile animal ...
Animals and most other organisms are aerobic, relying on oxygen; those that do not are confined to relatively rare anaerobic environments. Plants are the primary producers in most terrestrial ecosystems and form the basis of the food web in those ecosystems. [82]
Along with climate and corresponding types of vegetation, the economy of a nation also influences the level of agricultural production. Production of some products is highly concentrated in a few countries, China, the leading producer of wheat and ramie in 2013, produces 95% of the world's ramie fiber but only 17% of the world's wheat. Products ...
Gross primary production (GPP) is the amount of chemical energy, typically expressed as carbon biomass, that primary producers create in a given length of time.Some fraction of this fixed energy is used by primary producers for cellular respiration and maintenance of existing tissues (i.e., "growth respiration" and "maintenance respiration").
There are many different types of autotrophs in Earth's ecosystems. Lichens located in tundra climates are an exceptional example of a primary producer that, by mutualistic symbiosis, combines photosynthesis by algae (or additionally nitrogen fixation by cyanobacteria) with the protection of a decomposer fungus. As there are many examples of ...