What a tangled web nature weaves
How does energy flow through an ecosystem? We know that organisms obtain energy from the food that they consume, so with the help of food chains and webs we can determine the single source of the energy all organisms obtain.
Food WebsFood chains are a helpful way to understand how energy transfers from one organism to another, but food webs are a much more realistic representation of how energy flows through an ecosystem because many organisms consume more than one organism and/or are consumed by more than one organism.
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Consumers?! This isn't economics class!
Consumers are any organism that must consume, or eat, another organism to obtain energy. Depending on the types of organisms that are eaten, consumers are classified into one of six categories.
CarnivoresCarnivores eat meat, which means they have to kill other animals in order to obtain meat. Lions, wolves, and snakes are all examples of carnivores. It requires a lot of energy for carnivores to hunt and kill their prey, but the meat they obtain from a kill is rich in nutrients and energy.
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