Food Chains

Food chains describe the eating relationships between species within an ecosystem or a particular living place. Organisms are connected to the organisms they consume by lines representing the direction of organism or energy transfer. It also shows how the energy from the producer is given to the consumer. Typically a food chain or food web refers to a graph where only connections are recorded, and a food network or ecosystem network refers to a network where the connections are given weights representing the quantity of nutrients or energy being transferred.

A food chain is the flow of energy from one organism to the next and to the next and so on. Organisms in a food chain are grouped into trophic levels, based on how many links they are removed from the primary producers. Trophic levels may contain either a single species or a group of species that are presumed to share both predators and prey. They usually start with a plant and end with a carnivore.