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    Food Chains & Food Webs: 7C Environment and Feeding Relationships - Year 7

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    angeltwinkle
    1) Plants produce their own food through photosynthesis while animals must obtain energy by eating plants or other animals. 2) A food chain shows the transfer of energy from one organism to another as they eat and are eaten, starting with producers like plants and ending with top consumers. 3) There are fewer organisms at each successive level of the food chain because much of the energy is lost as heat at each transfer, so many herbivores are needed to support fewer carnivores higher up.

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    Food Chains & Food Webs: 7C Environment and Feeding Relationships - Year 7

    Uploaded by

    angeltwinkle
    99 views5 pages
    1) Plants produce their own food through photosynthesis while animals must obtain energy by eating plants or other animals. 2) A food chain shows the transfer of energy from one organism to another as they eat and are eaten, starting with producers like plants and ending with top consumers. 3) There are fewer organisms at each successive level of the food chain because much of the energy is lost as heat at each transfer, so many herbivores are needed to support fewer carnivores higher up.

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    Food Chains

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    1) Plants produce their own food through photosynthesis while animals must obtain energy by eating plants or other animals. 2) A food chain shows the transfer of energy from one organism to another as they eat and are eaten, starting with producers like plants and ending with top consumers. 3) There are fewer organisms at each successive level of the food chain because much of the energy is lost as heat at each transfer, so many herbivores are needed to support fewer carnivores higher up.

    Copyright:

    Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
    Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as docx, pdf, or txt
    99 views5 pages

    Food Chains & Food Webs: 7C Environment and Feeding Relationships - Year 7

    Uploaded by

    angeltwinkle
    1) Plants produce their own food through photosynthesis while animals must obtain energy by eating plants or other animals. 2) A food chain shows the transfer of energy from one organism to another as they eat and are eaten, starting with producers like plants and ending with top consumers. 3) There are fewer organisms at each successive level of the food chain because much of the energy is lost as heat at each transfer, so many herbivores are needed to support fewer carnivores higher up.

    Copyright:

    Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
    Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as docx, pdf, or txt
    of 5

    7C Environment and Feeding Relationships – Year 7

    Food Chains & Food


    Webs
    Do you like to play games? If you do, you will need energy. Every time you run or jump, you are using
    up energy in your body. How do you get the energy to play? You get energy from the food you eat.
    Similarly, all living things get energy from their food so that they can move and grow. As food passes
    through the body, some of it is digested. This process of digestion releases energy.

    A food chain shows how each living thing gets its food. Some animals eat plants and some animals
    eat other animals. For example, a simple food chain links the trees & shrubs, the giraffes (that eat
    trees & shrubs), and the lions (that eat the giraffes). Each link in this chain is food for the next link. A
    food chain always starts with plant life and ends with an animal.

    1. Plants are called producers because they are able to use light energy from the Sun
    to produce food (sugar) from carbon dioxide and water.

    2. Animals cannot make their own food so they must eat plants and/or other animals.
    They are called consumers. There are three groups of consumers.

    a. Animals that eat ONLY PLANTS are


    called herbivores (or primary consumers).

    b. Animals that eat OTHER ANIMALS are called carnivores.

     carnivores that eat herbivores are called secondary consumers

     carnivores that eat other carnivores are called tertiary consumers


    e.g., killer whales in an ocean food web ... phytoplankton → small
    fishes → seals → killer whales

    3. Animals and people who eat BOTH animals and plants are called omnivores.

    4. Then there are decomposers (bacteria and fungi) which feed on decaying matter. 

    These decomposers speed up the decaying process that releases mineral salts back
    into the food chain for absorption by plants as nutrients.

    Do you know why there are more herbivores than carnivores?

    In a food chain, energy is passed from one link to another. When a herbivore eats, only a fraction of
    the energy (that it gets from the plant food) becomes new body mass; the rest of the energy is lost as
    waste or used up by the herbivore to carry out its life processes (e.g., movement, digestion,
    reproduction). Therefore, when the herbivore is eaten by a carnivore, it passes only a small amount of
    total energy (that it has received) to the carnivore. Of the energy transferred from the herbivore to the
    carnivore, some energy will be "wasted" or "used up" by the carnivore. The carnivore then has to eat
    many herbivores to get enough energy to grow.

    Because of the large amount of energy that is lost at each link, the amount of energy that is
    transferred gets lesser and lesser.
    7C Environment and Feeding Relationships – Year 7

    1) The further along the food chain you go, the less food (and hence energy) remains available.
    7C Environment and Feeding Relationships – Year 7

    The above energy pyramid shows many trees & shrubs providing food and energy to giraffes. Note
    that as we go up, there are fewer giraffes than trees & shrubs and even fewer lions than giraffes ... as
    we go further along a food chain, there are fewer and fewer consumers. In other words, a large mass
    of living things at the base is required to support a few at the top ... many herbivores are needed to
    support a few carnivores.

    2) Most food chains have no more than four or five links.

    There cannot be too many links in a single food chain because the animals at the end of the chain
    would not get enough food (and hence energy) to stay alive.

    Most animals are part of more than one food chain and eat more than one kind of food in order to meet
    their food and energy requirements. These interconnected food chains form a food web.

    Note that the arrows are drawn from food source to food consumers
    ... in other words, you can substitute the arrows with the words
    "eaten by"

    Food chains in different habitats:  Desert  |  Coniferous Forest  |


    Deciduous Forest  |  Temperate Rainforest 
    7C Environment and Feeding Relationships – Year 7
    7C Environment and Feeding Relationships – Year 7

    Adaptations to Temperate Rainforest

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