The Basics
This term describes all the nonliving components of an ecosystem, such as water, soil, and sunlight.
What is Abiotic?
These organisms, such as green plants, create their own food using energy from the sun.
What are Producers?
This is a single path showing how energy moves from one organism to another (e.g., Sun - Grass - Zebra -Lion).
What is a food chain?
The specific organelle in plant cells where photosynthesis takes place.
Chloroplast
These organisms, also known as herbivores, eat only producers.
Primary Consumers
This term describes the living parts of an environment, including ducks, fish, and plants.
What is biotic?
These organisms must eat other living things to get the energy they need to survive.
What are consumers?
This complex diagram shows many overlapping food chains within an ecosystem.
What is a food web?
Plants take in this gas from the air and combine it with water and sunlight to make food.
Carbon Dioxide
These organisms eat primary consumers for energy.
Secondary Consumers
A place where both biotic (living) and abiotic (nonliving) things interact with each other.
What is Ecosystem?
This term describes a consumer that only eats plants.
What is a herbivore?
This term describes a consumer that eats both plants and animals.
What is an omnivore?
The green pigment found in plants that is responsible for absorbing light energy.
Chlorophyll
These organisms are often at the top of the food chain and have no natural predators.
Apex predators
In an ecosystem, these organisms break down dead matter and return nutrients to the soil.
Decomposers
Unlike energy, which flows in one direction, this is recycled within an ecosystem.
Matter
This term describes a consumer that only eats other animals (meat).
What is a carnivore?
These carnivores eat secondary consumers.
Tertiary Consumers
This term describes an organism that only eats plants.