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Food chains and food webs
Explain that a food chain illustrates how energy is transferred from one organism to another, starting with a producer.
18
Objectives
180
Flashcards
126
Questions
90 min
Study time
CambridgeIGCSEBiologyOrganisms and their environment
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18 objective pages available
Food chains and food webs outcomes18 objectives
- Explain that a food chain illustrates how energy is transferred from one organism to another, starting with a producer.
- Create and analyze basic food chains.
- Define a food web as a system of interconnected food chains and analyze food webs.
- Define a producer as an organism that generates its own organic nutrients, typically using sunlight through photosynthesis.
- Define a consumer as an organism that obtains energy by consuming other organisms.
- Recognize that consumers can be categorized as primary, secondary, tertiary, or quaternary based on their role in a food chain.
- Define a herbivore as an animal that derives its energy from eating plants.
- Define a carnivore as an animal that obtains its energy by consuming other animals.
- Define a decomposer as an organism that derives its energy from dead or decaying organic matter.
- Utilize food chains and food webs to explain the effects of human activities such as overfishing and introducing non-native species into ecosystems.
- Illustrate, explain, and analyze pyramids of numbers and biomass.
- Evaluate the benefits of using a pyramid of biomass over a pyramid of numbers to depict a food chain.
- Define a trophic level as the specific position of an organism within a food chain, food web, or ecological pyramid.
- Identify the trophic levels in food webs, food chains, and ecological pyramids, including producers, primary consumers, secondary consumers, tertiary consumers, and quaternary consumers.
- Illustrate, explain, and analyze energy pyramids.
- Evaluate the advantages of using a pyramid of energy compared to pyramids of numbers or biomass to represent a food chain.
- Clarify why energy transfer between trophic levels is often inefficient.
- Clarify, in terms of energy loss, why food chains typically consist of fewer than five trophic levels.
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