Above Ground Food Webs
In above ground food webs, energy moves from producers (plants) to primary consumers (herbivores) and then to secondary consumers (predators). The phrase, trophic level, refers to the different levels or steps in the energy pathway. In other words, the producers, consumers, and decomposers are the main trophic levels. This chain of energy transferring from one species to another can continue several more times, but eventually ends. At the end of the food chain, decomposers such as bacteria and fungi break down dead plant and animal material into simple nutrients.
Read more about this topic: Soil Food Web
Famous quotes containing the words ground, food and/or webs:
“O how can it be that the ground itself does not sicken?
How can you be alive you growths of spring?
How can you furnish health you blood of herbs, roots, orchards, grain?
Are they not continually putting distemper’d corpses within you?
Is not every continent work’d over and over with sour dead?”
—Walt Whitman (1819–1892)
“Hume, and other sceptical innovators, are vain men, and will gratify themselves at any expense. Truth will not afford sufficient food to their vanity; so they have betaken themselves to errour. Truth, sir, is a cow which will yield such people no more milk, and so they are gone to milk the bull.”
—Samuel Johnson (1709–1784)
“Sometimes outside beneath a bombers’ moon
You stood alone to watch the searchlights trace
Their careful webs against the boding sky,”
—Edgar Bowers (b. 1924)