AI overview
A food chain describes the sequence of living organisms in an ecosystem, where each organism eats the one below it and is eaten by the one above it, starting with plants and ending with predators. Understanding food chains matters because it shows how energy and nutrients flow through ecosystems, helping us see how all living things are connected and dependent on one another.
AI-generated from the Wikipedia summary — may contain errors.
Research
89,413 papers- Antimicrobial resistomes in food chain microbiomes.Critical reviews in food science and nutrition · 2024
- The resistome of the food chain: A One Health perspective.Microbial biotechnology · 2024
- Microplastics in the Food Chain: Food Safety and Environmental Aspects.Reviews of environmental contamination and toxicology · 2021
- Unleashing the Potential of Digitalization in the Agri-Food Chain for Integrated Food Systems.Annual review of food science and technology · 2024
- Viruses of invertebrates related to the food-chain.Journal of invertebrate pathology · 2017
via PubMed
Article
Food chain in a Swedish lake. Osprey feed on northern pike, which in turn feed on perch which eat bleak which eat crustaceans.
A food chain is a linear network of links in a food web, often beginning with an autotroph (such as grass or algae), also called a producer, and typically ending at an apex predator (such as grizzly bears or killer whales), detritivore (such as earthworms and woodlice), or decomposer (such as fungi or bacteria). A food web is distinct from a food chain. A food chain illustrates the associations between organisms according to the energy sources they consume in trophic levels, and the most common way to quantify them is in length: the number of links between a trophic consumer and the base of the chain.