1. Food Chains and Food Webs
Notes
Food Chains and Food Webs

2. Everything you do requires energy.

3. Energy
You use chemical energy for everything you do, which comes from the food you eat.

4. All living things need energy.
Most of the energy on Earth comes directly or indirectly from the Sun.

5. Producers
Producer- an organism that captures energy and stores it in food as chemical energy.

6. Producers
Plants and other organisms capture energy from the Sun through photosynthesis.

7. Plants are the most common producers on land.
In water, bacteria and algae are the most common producers.

8. Producers
In the deep ocean, organisms use chemicals released by vents instead of sunlight to convert energy to a usable form (chemosynthesis).

9. Consumer- an organism that gets its energy by eating other organisms.
Consumers
Consumer- an organism that gets its energy by eating other organisms.

10. Consumers
Consumers are classified by their position in a food chain or food web.
A food chain starts with a producer, followed by one or more consumers.

11. Consumers
Primary Consumer- the first link between producers and the rest of the ecosystem.
Example: Grasshoppers and antelope that eat grasses.

12. Secondary Consumer- eats the primary consumers.
Examples: Wolves that eat the antelopes and birds that eat the grasshoppers.

13. Tertiary Consumer- eats the secondary consumers.
Example: a falcon that eats the bird.

14. Scavenger- a consumer that feeds on dead animals.
Consumers
Scavenger- a consumer that feeds on dead animals.
Example: Vulture

15. Decomposers
Decomposers- organisms that break down dead plant and animal matter into simpler compounds.

16. Decomposers are the clean up crew of an ecosystem.

17. Food Chains
Food chain- describes the link between a producer and a SINGLE CHAIN of consumers.

18. Food Chains
The arrows in a food chain represent the flow of energy from organism to organism.

19. Food Webs
Food web- a model of the feeding relationships between many different consumers and producers in an ecosystem.

20. Food Web
Sometimes an organism can be classified as more than one kind of consumer-both primary and secondary, for example.

21. Energy Pyramid
Energy pyramid- shows the amount of energy available at each feeding level of an ecosystem.

22. Energy Pyramid
The first level is the producers, the second level is the primary consumers, etc.
The amount of energy decreases as it moves from producers up through the consumers.

23. Energy Pyramid
The amount of available energy gets smaller and smaller the farther up the pyramid you go.