What is your favourite food?! Let’s discover five wonderful food web facts for kids.
A food web consists of all the food chains interconnected in an ecosystem. Each living thing in an ecosystem is part of many different food chains. Each food chain is one possible path that energy and nutrients may take as they move through the ecosystem. Food chains can be long or short but whatever length they are they are always a series of steps, there is no overlapping.
Organisms in food webs are grouped into categories called trophic levels. There are three trophic levels: producers, consumers and decomposers. Producers make up the first trophic level. Producers, also known as autotrophs, make their own food and do not depend on any other organism for nutrition.
Most autotrophs use a process called photosynthesis to make their food. Examples of producers are plants, bacteria and fungi. Consumers are the second trophic level. They cannot make their own food. Organisms in this level eat plants or other animals or some eat both. Detritivores and decomposers make up the last trophic level. Detritivores are organisms that eat non living plants and animal remains.
Consumers are split into four types: omnivores, herbivores, scavengers and carnivores. An omnivore is an animal that eats both plants and animals. Most humans are omnivores, besides vegetarians and vegans. People eat plants, such as fruits and vegetables and also eat animals and animal products, such as meat and milk. Some animals are also omnivores, for example, bears eat both berries and fish such as salmon.
An herbivore is an animal that only eats plants, algae, and other producers. Herbivores do not eat meat, for example deer, sheep and goats. A scavenger is an animal that eats dead animals, for example, vultures and coyotes. A carnivore is an animal that only eats other animals and does not eat plants, for example, lions and sharks.
As omnivores, we are a part of the food web. Because we eat both plants and animals, we are primary and secondary consumers. Eating fruits and veg make us a primary consumer and eating chicken and bacon makes us a secondary consumer Humans are said to be at the top of the food chain. This doesn’t mean that nothing will eat us but it means that we are at less threat of being eaten than most other organisms.
Decomposers turn organic wastes, such as decaying plants, into inorganic materials, such as nutrient-rich soil. They complete the lifecycle by returning nutrients to the soil for the use of producers. The four types of decomposers are, fungi, insects, earthworms, and bacteria.
We hope you enjoyed learning more things about food web as much as we loved teaching you about them. Now that you know how majestic the environment is, you can move on to learn about other STEM articles like: Soil Erosion and Food Waste.
Why not subscribe to our LearningMole Library for as little as £1.99 per month to access over 2800 fun educational videos.
Leave a Reply