Food Webs

It's probably hard to say, right? Healthy humans eat a wide variety of plants, and many eat animals, too. In fact, most animals eat more than one type of food. Grasshoppers eat more than one kind of plant. Foxes eat mice, rabbits, and squirrels.

You may eat peanut butter sandwiches. You may also eat tuna fish sandwiches. Each of the things you eat is a part of separate food chains, but they combine together to show all the eating relationships in your life.

When you eat peanuts, you are part of one food chain. When you eat fish, you are part of another. In the first, energy goes from the sun, through the peanut plant, and on to you. When you eat tuna, the sun energy goes through a plant growing in the ocean, to smaller fish, which are then eaten by the bigger tuna fish. The other parts of the sandwich--and of the meal--come from food chains, too. All the different things you eat are connected through you, so you are a common link in many different food chains.

A system in which energy travels between a community of organisms is called an ecosystem. An ecosystem has many, many different food chains that all have common links. Most animals are part of many food chains. All of these food chains together make up a food web. Each and every ecosystem, whether it's a desert, forest, or river, has many food chains and one big food web containing all of the chains in the ecosystem.