Food Chain And Ecosystem


 
 
Concept Explanation
 

Food Chain And Ecosystem

Food Chain: Some or all of these trophic levels combine to form a food web/food chain, the ecosystem's mechanism for circulating and recycling energy and materials. A food chain represents a succession of organisms that eat another organism and are, in turn, eaten themselves. The number of steps an organism holds from the start of the chain is a measure of its trophic level. For example, in an aquatic ecosystem, algae and other aquatic plants use sunlight to produce energy in the form of carbohydrates. Primary consumers such as insects and small fish may feed on some of this plant matter, and are, in turn, eaten by secondary consumers, such as salmon. A brown bear may play the role of the tertiary consumer by catching and eating salmon. Bacteria and fungi may then feed upon and decompose the salmon carcass left behind by the bear, enabling the valuable non-living components of the ecosystem, such as chemical  nutrients, to leach back into the soil and water, where they can be absorbed by the roots of plants. In this way, nutrients and the energy that green plants derive from sunlight are efficiently transferred and recycled throughout the ecosystem.

For example, one food chain may be represented as follows:

Sun         rightarrow      Algae           rightarrow    Fish                                        rightarrow  Salmon                                    rightarrow   Brown Bear

(Energy)           (Producer)          (First-order consumer)               (Second-order consumer)             (Tertiary consumer)

                           (Autotroph)            (Herbivore)                                    (Carnivore)                                       (Carnivore)

The number of steps in the food chain is limited to four or five. At each step in a food chain, a large portion of energy is used for its own maintenance, and then lost as heat. As a result, organisms in each trophic level pass on less and less energy than they receive. The longer the chain, the lesser is the energy available to the final member. In a simple food chain, out of say 1,000 calories of energy reaching the plant, only 10 calories (1%) are stored by plant. The remaining are lost either to the environment or to the plant for its own maintenance. Of the 10 calories available to the herbivore, nine are lost at its level and one is passed on to the carnivores.

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