Food Webs

About Food Webs|

The natural world can be a hostile environment because in nature organisms tend to hunt down, kill and eat each other. This is the basis of the predator-prey relationship that provides the structure upon which food chains are drawn.

A food chain is a simple picture that shows the feeding relationshipo between a number of species in a simple line format, starting with plants at the bottom and ending with the predators that sit at the top of the food chain, i.e. Tertiary consumers that have no natural predators themselves. However, in nature the true picture is much more complicated than this. This is due to a number of reasons:

Many organisms don't have only one type of food e.g. omnivores which eat plants and animals.
Most predators hunt down, kill and eat a wide range of other species.
Some predators are cannibalistic, i.e. they hunt down, kill and eat others of the same species.
With some species the young eat the old or the old eat the young.
Feeding relationships can change at different stages of the lifecycle

So in reality, the relationship of what eats what in nature are very complex, and a food chain is far too simple to show it fully. To help to create a more accurate picture we can combine our food chains to help us to make a more complex and accurate picture of what eats what in any particular habitat. This more complex picture is known as a FOOD WEB.

Below is an example of a Food Web

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