Unit 6 · Nature and EnvironmentThe Food Chain
Words of this topic
- Autotroph: an organism that makes its own food by photosynthesis, such as a green plant.
- Heterotroph: an organism that cannot make its own food and takes food from other organisms, as animals do.
- Producer: a plant that holds solar energy as stored energy and becomes the primary source of food for all organisms.
- Consumer: an organism that lives by eating producers or other organisms.
- Trophic level: each step of a food chain at which energy is passed on.
- Decomposer: an organism that rots dead organisms and mixes them into the soil.
- Food chain: the sequence in which energy passes in one direction from the producer to the topmost consumer.
- Food web: the complex network formed when many food chains interlink, in which energy passes in many directions.
- Ecosystem: the system formed by the organisms of a place and their relationships with their environment.