Food Chain and Food Web

1) Explain How the Slight Environmental Change Can Impact the Food Chain.

• Any intervention in the environment affects the number and habitat of plants and animals.Any intervention in the environment affects the number and habitat of plants and animals.
• An increase or decrease in the number of organisms at any trophic level of a food chain affects the whole food chain.

2) Why Is Only 10% of the Energy Transferred to Every Successive Trophic Level in a Food Chain? What Happens to the Remaining 90% of the Energy?

The energy at each trophic level is consumed because of the following reasons—

• Energy is used by consumers for various living processes like respiration, digestion, locomotion, etc.
• Some amount of energy is lost in the environment in the form of heat.

3) What Do You Understand by a Parasitic Food Chain? How Is It Different From Other Food Chains?

• Parasitism is the mutual relationship between living organisms in which one organism benefits from the other by causing harm to it.
• The organism that provides nutritional benefits is called the host. The dependent organism that causes harm to the host is called the parasite. For example, the head louse that is found on people’s scalp. It sucks blood from the scalp for its nutrition, thereby causing harm to the host.
• The food chain, which shows the exchange of food between the parasite and the host, is called the parasitic food chain.
• It is different from the other food chains because—
• Generally, the number of consumers decreases with the successive levels of the food chain. But in the case of a parasitic food chain, the number of organisms may increase instead of decrease. For example, many lice can depend on a single buffalo for food.