What is it called when you include several food chains together in a single diagram?

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Who eats whom?
Food Chains and Food Webs
Summary
Review

Describing the flow of energy within an ecosystem essentially answers this question. To survive, one must eat. Why? To get energy. Food chains and webs describe the transfer of energy within an ecosystem, from one organism to another. In other words, they show who eats whom.

Food chains and food webs are diagrams that represent feeding relationships. Essentially, they show who eats whom. In this way, they model how energy and matter move through ecosystems.

A food web represents multiple pathways through which energy and matter flow through an ecosystem. It includes many intersecting food chains. It demonstrates that most organisms eat, and are eaten, by more than one species. Examples are shown in Figures below and below.

Food Web. This food web consists of several different food chains. Which organisms are producers in all of the food chains included in the food web?

Examples of food webs.

Food chains and food webs are diagrams that represent feeding relationships.
Food chains and webs model how energy and matter move through ecosystems.

What is a food chain?
Describe the role of decomposers in food webs.
Why is a food web more realistic than a food chain?
Draw a terrestrial food chain that includes four feeding levels.

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A food chain outlines who eats whom. A food web is all of the food chains in an ecosystem. Each organism in an ecosystem occupies a specific trophic level or position in the food chain or web. Producers, who make their own food using photosynthesis or chemosynthesis, make up the bottom of the trophic pyramid. Primary consumers, mostly herbivores, exist at the next level, and secondary and tertiary consumers, omnivores and carnivores, follow. At the top of the system are the apex predators: animals who have no predators other than humans.

Help your class explore food chains and webs with these resources.

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