Food Webs By:Brian K.s
Food Chains:
The food chain is the balance of producers, carnivores, herbavores,and scavengers. Whithout this balance life would not exist. The producers are at the bottom of the food chain, the are eaten by herbavores and omnivores. The carnivores and omnavores eat the herbavores. Scavengers eat the animals that have died, or the animals that are left over from other animals. Yet a food chain does not show the "Big Picture" of animals that exist, it only shows the animals that don't have natural enimies or that are powerful carnivores.

Corbis


Food Webs:
A food web is a representation of the balance of animals being consumed by other animals. For example an animal eats more than one kind of animal, not just one as shown in a food chain. This is better to explain the delicate balance between having too many or too little of a species. Another example is how humans eat (or can eat) all types of animals if they want to. Yet a food chain would only show the relationship of a human to the next thing on the list. An animal can be eaten on several levels though, like how a mouse is eaten by snakes and hawks together.

MSN Encarta


The Delicate Balance of Organisms:
There is a delicate balance between all that exists, and all that is eaten and eats. If there is an "unbalance" then life would slowly be destroyed. For example if all of the plants in an area were destroyed by pollution, there wolud be no food for the herbavores. In that there would be no food for the carnivores. The last ones to be alive would be the scavengers or the strongest carnivor. Yet even though all the warnings have been broght up, people are still destroying habitats for animals.
Produced 2001 by Memorial Middle School
{Home Page} {Producers} {Food Webs} {Herbivores}
{Carnivores} {Omnivores} {Scavengers} {Conservation}
<<<Return to Student Web Sites