Why is a food web a more realistic way of portraying an ecosystem than a food chain?
1 Answer
Because it shows the relation of organisms with each other in a habitat, rather than just a small segment of it like a food chain.
It is also still pretty easy to understand like a food chain.
Explanation:
It's more realistic due to the fact you can add more organisms into the mix, and show how they interact with each other in an ecosystem. Rather than just doing a small segment of about 3 or 4 animals in a basic food chain, you can have as many different animals as you want from an ecosystem in a food web, whom both can eat the same organism, be it a producer or less predator.
You can also begin to identify possible circumstances or effect of the removal or the decrease or increase of one or more species in the ecosystem.
For example, the producer on the diagram could be grass, and there are sheep and goats eating it, and mountain lions and wolves eating the sheep and goats. The Humans nearby hunt the mountain lions and kill off the mountain lions.
The wolves then rapidly increase in number due to the lack of competition from the mountain lions and begin eating up more of the sheep and goats, causing the sheep and goat population to get really small, and causing a lot more grass to grow.
This is just one example of how a food web changes where the loss of a predator can have cascading effects through the ecosystem, showing how the food web is much more realistic at portraying an ecosystem than a food chain.
