Learning About Food Webs and Energy Pyramids Summary

In order for one to understand what a food web is, he or she must first know what a food chain is. A food chain shows the movement of energy and nutrients from one organism to another when the first organism is eaten by the second, who's in turn eaten by a third and so on (Environmental Issues and Solutions Module Curriculum Guide). And so the type of food that each organism in a food chain eats determine its Trophic level. Therefore Trophic levels or feeding levels include a producer, a primary consumer, a secondary consumer, a tertiary consumer, and a decomposer. This is the order whereby organisms feed in a food chain: Producers produce their own food, then primary consumers eat the producers. The primary consumers are then eaten by a secondary consumer who is later eaten by a tertiary consumer. Producers are also known as an autotrophs because they are self feeders, meaning that they make their own food while all consumers who can't produce their own food are heterotrophs because they eat autotrophs or other heterotrophs (Environmental Issues and Solutions Module Curriculum Guide). Within food chains exist Energy Pyramids which tell us that at every Trophic level to which energy is transferred, 90 percent of the energy being transferred is lost. This means that when a primary consumer eats a producer, they only acquire 10 percent of the producer's energy, and when a secondary consumer eats a primary consumer, only 10 percent of the energy is acquired. So, a food web is a network of interconnected food chains.

The biome for my food web is the ocean because all the creatures in the food web reside in the ocean. The first food chain consists of a marine fungi, a tiger shark, a lantern fish, an oysters and a sargassum. And so this is a food web because it consists of a network of interconnected food chains. In this case, the sargassum is the autotroph/producer because it produces its own food then the oysters, being the primary consumer eats the sargassum. As a result, the lantern fish(secondary consumer) eats the oyster, then the tiger shark(tertiary consumer) eats the lantern fish. Lastly, when the tiger shark dies, the marine fungi decomposes its remains. This is a food web because these food chains in the picture are interconnected meaning that a primary consumer from one food chain like the sea turtle man consume a sargassum instead of the producer in its food chain.

Work Cited

Frey Scientific. Environmental Issues and Solutions Module Curriculum Guide. Nashua, New Hampshire: Frey Scientific, 2013. Print