Coming soon…
Food webs are networks that are formed by linking together all feeding interactions (when one organism consumes another living organism) within an ecological community. In essence, food webs show how nutrients and energy are transferred throughout a community from plants (primary producers), to herbivores (primary consumers), to their predators (secondary consumers), and their predators, and so on. Food webs can depict predator-prey interactions that affect competition for food resources, for example when two predators compete for the same prey. Food webs can also reveal the complexity of feeding interactions within a community, for instance communities with more species or where predators feed on multiple prey species will have more food web connections. Theoretical ecologists often use information from food webs to determine energy flow and to understand how resilient an ecosystem is to disturbances like overfishing where species are removed. In this lesson, we will create graphical representations in which students explore food web connections. Students will then act as conservation practitioners or fisheries managers and examine overfishing large predators effect populations of other species in the food web.