Trophic Levels & Energy Flow
The individual steps or feeding levels in a food chain or food web.
What are trophic levels?
Organisms such as grasses and algae that synthesize their own food using light energy.
What are autotrophs (or primary producers)?
Bacteria living in your digestive tract that help you digest food while getting nutrients represent this mutually beneficial relationship.
What is mutualism?
The specific role or job that an organism plays within its environment.
What is a niche?
An activity where a fungus breaks down the body of a dead animal is a direct example of this process.
What is decomposition (or recycling organic compounds)?
Another name for a herbivore that directly feeds on primary producers.
What is a primary consumer?
A network model depicting multiple overlapping food chains and energy pathways in an ecosystem.
What is a food web?
Mistletoe growing on trees and absorbing water and nutrients directly from the tree's tissues is an example of this interaction.
What is parasitism (or parasite/host)?
When two organisms attempt to occupy overlapping niches in the same area, they enter into this interaction.
What is competition?
Organisms like bacteria and fungi that break down dead material and return nutrients to the soil.
What are decomposers?
For an energy pyramid to represent a sustainable ecosystem, this trophic level must contain the most available energy.
What is the producer level (or autotrophs)?
In a food chain or food web diagram, arrows always point in the direction of this.
What is the flow of energy?
In a parasitic relationship, the organism that is harmed while supplying nutrients to the parasite is known as this.
What is the host?
Unlike a niche (which is a role), the actual physical place where an organism lives is called its.
What is a habitat?
Unlike energy, which flows one way through an ecosystem, nutrients and matter must be.
What is recycled?
The estimated percentage of available energy that successfully transfers from one trophic level up to the next.
What is 10 percent?
In addition to grasshoppers, herring in a marine/aquatic web get energy by consuming these organisms.
What are mosquitoes?
A relationship between two organisms where one organism benefits and the other is neither helped nor harmed.
What is commensalism?
All of the biotic (living) and abiotic (nonliving) factors interacting in a given area.
What is an ecosystem?
Organisms such as snails, shrimp, and earthworms that physically grind detritus particles into smaller pieces.
What are detritivores?
The remaining 90 percent of energy not transferred to the next level is used by organisms for life processes or lost to the environment as this.
What is heat (or metabolic energy)?
Animals like vultures that feed on the carcasses of dead animals rather than hunting live prey.
What are scavengers?
The general biological term for two different species living together in a close, long-term interaction.
What is symbiosis?
Environmental factors or conditions that constrain or limit the growth and size of a population.
What are limiting factors?
Decomposers break down dead tissue to return these carbon-containing chemical compounds back to the ecosystem.
What are organic compounds?