Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lonely Tylenol" data-source="post: 3192537" data-attributes="member: 18549">No, they're not.  The idea of a food web is as opposed to a food chain, which was the original concept of how energy travels through an ecosystem.  A food chain starts with primary producer A, which is eaten by herbivore B, which is eaten by predator C, which is eaten by predator D, and so on.  A food web acknowledges that primary producer A is eaten by herbivores B, C, and D, as well as decomposers E1 through E35, all of which are variously eaten by predators F through Q, some of which also eat each other, and all of which are eventually eaten by members of the E-series of decomposers.  Energy starts with primary producers, and leaves the system as heat, but it by no means travels through a determinate pathway.  Hence, the concept of a web.As for everything being tied to everything else, as soon as you remove one species from a community, you've just freed up niche space that can be colonized by other species.  This will change the community organization and may result in extinction of other species, the formation of new species somewhere down the road, or alterations in the relative species abundance in the community, as well as other effects.  Remove certain "keystone" species, often predators, and you can cause the community to collapse entirely.  Every species in a typical community is constrained in some way by the presence of other species, either through competition or predation, and altering the species makeup of a community will alter those constraints, either directly or indirectly.  Hence, everything is tied to everything else, at least on a local level.But if anyone does have the impression that primary producers making use of a significant source of energy are not necessary to a community because "everything's tied to everything else", allow me to disabuse you of that notion.</blockquote>

Verification