Are there more producers than consumers

Food availability may vary seasonally or by time of day. An organism like a mouse might play two roles, eating insects on occasion making it a secondary consumer , but also dining directly on plants making it a primary consumer.

A food web of who eats who in the southwest American desert biome might look something like this:. Keystone Species : In some food webs, there is one critical " keystone species " upon which the entire system depends.

In the same way that an arch collapses when the keystone is removed, an entire food chain can collapse if there is a decline in a keystone species. Often, the keystone species is a predator that keeps the herbivores in check, and prevents them from overconsuming the plants, leading to a massive die off.

When we remove top predators like grizzly bears, orca whales, or wolves , for example, there is evidence that it affects not just the prey species, but even the physical environment. Apex Predators : These species are at the top of the food chain and the healthy adults have no natural predators. The young and old may in some cases be preyed upon, but they typically succumb to disease, hunger, the effects of aging, or some combination of them.

The also suffer from competition with humans, who often eliminate the top predators in order to have exclusive access to the prey species, or through habitat destruction, which is an indirect form of competition. Decomposers : When organisms die, they are sometimes eaten by scavengers but the remaining tissues are broken down by fungi and bacteria. In this way, the nutrients that were part of the body are returned to the bottom of the trophic pyramid.

Bioaccumulation : In addition to being less energy efficient, eating higher up the food chain has its risks. Pesticides and heavy metals like mercury, arsenic, and lead tend to be consumed in small quantities by the primary consumers.

These toxins get stored in the fats of the animal. When this animal is eaten by a secondary consumer, these toxins become more concentrated because secondary consumers eat lots of primary consumers, and often live longer too. There are fewer consumers than producers.

Producers such as plants, algae, and cyanobacteria use the energy from sunlight to make organic matter from carbon dioxide and water. What would happen in an ecosystem if the consumers population was the same as the producers population? They would starve and die unless they could move to another habitat. All the other animals in the food web would die too, because their food supplies would have gone.

The populations of the consumers would fall as the population of the producer fell. Asked by: Hebert Zanda asked in category: General Last Updated: 2nd March, Are there more producers than consumers in the ecosystem?

We eat more than we produce, but the more primary consumers will eat the consumers , as consumers will consume energy from producers. There is more producers , because without producers consumer populations would go down. So this is proving that we have more producers in an ecosystem than consumers. What are quaternary consumers? Quaternary consumers are predators who eat a lot of prey but are usually not preyed upon themselves.

They are the apex predators at the top of the food chain. Food Chain: Quaternary Consumer. What is the difference between primary secondary and tertiary consumers? The main difference between primary secondary and tertiary consumers is that primary consumers are the herbivores that feed on plants, and secondary consumers can be either carnivores, which prey on other animals, or omnivores, which feed on both animals and plants, whereas tertiary consumers are the apex predators.

What are examples of consumers? Herbivores are always primary consumers, and omnivores can be primary consumers when consuming plants for food.

Examples of primary consumers can include rabbits, bears, giraffes, flies, humans, horses, and cows. Is shrimp a secondary consumer? Secondary consumers include fish, whales and the friendly basking, and whale sharks. They are the animals in the middle of the food chain. They are eaten by the tertiary consumers, which, I will tell you about in minute.

There is more producers, because without producers consumer populations would go down. So this is proving that we have more producers in an ecosystem than consumers. There is always more biomass in lower trophic levels than in higher ones. Because biomass decreases with each trophic level, there are always more autotrophs than herbivores in a healthy food web. There are more herbivores than carnivores.

It is also important to remember that a healthy ecosystem has more plants primary producers and decomposers than herbivores and carnivores. There are also more herbivores than carnivores.