Food chains are made of two different types of organisms: producers and consumers. Producers make their own food by taking nutrients from the environment and using photosynthesis to convert energy from the sun into food. Producers are at the bottom of the food chain, and have the most energy. Consumers are organisms that can't make their own nutrients; instead, they take their nutrients from other organisms (both producers and consumers). There are different levels of consumers, which include primary, secondary, and tertiary. All this indicates is what type of food the organism eats, or its trophic level. Primary consumers eat producers, secondary consumers eat primary consumers, and tertiary consumers eat secondary consumers. The last level of consumers include detritus feeders and decomposers. Detritus feeders, like vultures, consume the remains of other consumers, instead of killing and eating them. Decomposers, like earthworms, release nutrients into the soil as they feed on nonliving matter. (Miller, Tyler G. and Spoolman Scott E. Living in the Environment (17th Edition). Belmont, California: Brooks/Cole Cengage Learning, 2012. Print.)
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| Food Web |
The picture above shows a representation of a food web our group made during the lab activity. This web is made up of three different food chains-- one from each member of the group. The food web starts with the bottom row of plants (producers), then goes up through the levels of consumers until the decomposers. However, in an actual ecosystem, organisms don't stay within the boundaries of a food chain. For example, the bat from Food Chain 1 also ate fruit, which connected it to Food Chain 3's producer. We left out the connections for the decomposers and detritus feeders, as they would connect to everything.
Our group decided that our biome was a tropical rain forest. In tropical rain forests, there's ample water but much of the light is blocked by thick canopies (Frey 2013). They support a diverse array of organisms, but there aren't many large predators. In our group, the only large predator was a leopard, which fit the description nicely.
