Living organisms live on Earth not separately, and constantly interact with each other including have relations the hunter food. These relations which are consistently concluded between ranks of animals are called power-supply circuits or food chains. The unlimited number of beings of different types, childbirth, classes, types and so on can enter them.
Power-supply circuit
The most part of organisms on the planet eats organic food, including bodies of other beings or products of their activity. Nutrients consistently pass from one animal to another, forming food chains. That organism which begins this chain is called a producer. As the logic prompts, producers cannot eat organic matter – they take energy from inorganic materials, that is are autotrophic. These are generally green plants and different types of bacteria. They make the bodies and nutrients for the functioning from mineral salts, gases, radiation. For example, plants receive food by means of photosynthesis on light.
As the following links in a food chain konsument which are already heterotrophic organisms act. Konsumentami of the first order name those who eat producers – plants or bacteria. Their most part – herbivorous and herbivorous animals. The second order is made by predators – organisms which eat other animals. Further konsument of the third, fourth, fifth order follow and so on – still food chain will not become isolated.
Food chains not such simple as can seem at first sight. An important part of chains is made by detritofag which eat the decaying organisms of dead animals. On the one hand, they can eat bodies of the predators which died in hunting or from an old age, and with another, often become their production. The closed power-supply circuits result. Besides, chains branch, at their levels there is not one, but a set of types which form complex structures.
Ecological pyramid
Such term as ecological pyramid is closely connected with a concept of a food chain: it is the structure showing ratios between producers and konsument in the nature. In 1927 the scientist Charles Elton opened the effect called by the rule of an ecological pyramid. It is that by transfer of nutrients from some organisms to others, on the following level of a pyramid, a part of energy is lost. As a result from the bottom to top the pyramid is gradually narrowed: so, only hundred kilograms of herbivores which, in turn, become food for ten kilograms of predators are the share of one thousand kilograms of plants. Larger predators will take only one kilogram for creation of the biomass from them. These are conditional figures, but they well reflect in an example as food chains in the nature work. They also show that the chain is longer, the less energy reaches its end.