Food Chains, Food Webs and energy transfer.

Important words: 

Autotroph: Any organism that can make their own food. 

Heterotroph: Any organism that must eat something is order to obtain energy. 

Energy: The source of everything on this planet. :-)

In order to pass biology, you must make a chain: 

As you can previously remember from G.C.S.E and As biology, all animals have to eat something in order to survive. Herbivores like to eat plants, Carnivores like meat, Onivores like both. 

In the wonderful world of biology we can show what each species consumes by using a food chain. You might remember these bad boys from GCSE and As but we'll go through them again just to make sure. 

Let's imagine the ocean. Now the ocean has lots of speices eating other but we'll just do the basic one here, so we know (or should know) that all food chains start with a producer (autotroph, plant etc.), so in this case we'll take good old fashioned sea weed. So seaweed is eating by a little fish, then the little fish is eaten by a bigger fish and finally the bigger fish is eaten by a shark.  So if we made the food chain, it would look like this:

SEAWEED --> LITTLE FISH --> BIGGER FISH --> SHARK. 

Remember that the arrows must point in the direction of comsumption. 

Biology, it's a bit of a tangle:

So we've got a food chain. Unfortunlately the reality is that Seaweed is eaten by lots of different organisms. For example: 

• It can be eaten by plankton which are eaten by whales. 
• Seals can also have it as part of their diet and are eaten by orcas, Moreover seals can eat the…