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Most people understand what a food chain is, and a food chain is a very
simple way of looking at a bigger picture called a food web. A food web
is made up of all the different plants and animals that have an effect
on one another by their feeding habits. A group of food chains meshed together
make a food web.
About 40 percent of the energy of aquatic plants is lost through respiring, growing, reproducing, and waste removal. Seventy-five percent of the energy of herbivores is lost through eating, respiring, waste removal, molting, growing, and reproducing. First-order carnivores waste 55% of their energy in their normal body activities. Thus a given food chain can support many more herbivores than carnivores. |
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1. Describe how organisms are related
to each other in a food web.
2. Give examples of how factors that impact one part of a food web can also affect its other parts. 3. If the herbivores were taken out of a food web by a disaster, what would happen to the producers and the carnivores? 4. If a new organism came into the environment and held the same position in the food web as a native organism, consider all the possibilities of what might happen. Are all non-native species bad for the food web? |
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1.
Farm pond management tips
2. The Impact of Hydrodynamic Transport and Zebra Mussel Filtering on Pelagic Food Webs 3. Foodchain Contamination of Edible Fish Through Zebra Mussel- Directed Trophic Transfer |
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1. Great Lakes Instructional Materials for the Changing Earth System
2. Earth Systems - Education Activities for Great Lakes Schools (ES-EAGLS) Life in the Great Lakes 3. Global Change in the Great Lakes Scenarios
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Source: The
Great Lakes:
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1. The Great Lakes: An Environmental Atlas and Resource Book http://www.epa.gov/glnpo/atlas/glat-ch4.html#7 2. Canada's Aquatic Environments http://www.aquatic.uoguelph.ca/ 3. Sea World's Food Web Wonder Page http://www.seaworld.org/Key_West/foodweb.html 4. Food web simulations for IBM http://www.dmu.dk/PublicFiles/foodweb.htm 5. Definition and brief description http://www.smalltown.com/goals2000/projects/foodweb.htm |