Introduction

Summary

An ecosystem brings together living things (animal and vegetable) and the environment in which they live and interact.

A food web (or trophic web) is the tying  together of several food chains within the same ecosystem. In this web, one living thing eats another to assure its own survival.

For this reason, one can also characterize a trophic web by the passage of energy (matter) from one living thing to another according to a particular hierarchy.  One thus makes the following distinctions:

Producers (plants) capable of producing their own energy (matter), principally by means of photosynthesis.

Consumers (aniimals) who eat another member of the web in order to obtain energy.The herbivores, the carnivores and the large carnivorous predators  belong to this consumers category.

Decomposers, not represented in this animation, complete the life cycle by degrading organic materail derived from the above categories (waste material, carrion).

Goals

• To teach the link between food and energy.
• To show how animals obtain their food/energy.
• To identify several food chains within the same ecosystem.
• To define the terms Producer, Consumer, herbivore, large carnivorous predator, prey, predator
• To emphasize the interdependence among living things. These complex relationships are at the heart of biodiversity.

Features

Click on an element of the ecosystem to make it disappear.

Click on "Next Step" to simulate a possible long term consequence.

Tags

animal prey predator herbivore carnivore nutrients ecosystem life biodiversity food-web food-chain trophic biocoenosis biocenose