Designing Food Webs

Essay Instructions:

You will design two food webs.
The first food web you will construct will include yourself as the tertiary consumer. Illustrate this food web first, starting with the producer that your food eats or that you eat.
Then illustrate a food web for another organism. It can be from multiple organisms in your backyard or inside your house (for example, a food web for your cat), etc. Be sure to indicate which trophic level each organism belongs to. Feel free to use the below article to help you explore nature in your own backyard!
Johnson, D. (2020). Exploring nature in your own backyard. https://sites(dot)northwestern(dot)edu/daniellejohnson/2020/04/21/exploring-nature-in-your-own-backyard
First, illustrate a food web in your own backyard or inside your house. Indicate the trophic level that each organism belongs to:
Examples:
Grass (producer) > grasshopper (primary consumer) > frog (secondary consumer) > fox (tertiary consumer) > earthworm (decomposer)
Nuts (from tree - producer) > deer (primary consumer) > coyote (tertiary consumer) > vulture (apex predator)
Nuts (from tree - producer) > jackrabbit (secondary consumer) > coyote (tertiary consumer) > vulture (apex predator)
Second, answer the following questions:
Describe how complex your food web is and what is happening within your food web and ecosystem. You can indicate how humans may affect the food web directly or indirectly. Make sure to explain your observations.
Indicate the flow of energy through the food web. Where is your primary source of energy coming from? (Keep in mind that not all ecosystems will have primary productivity coming from plants: think desert or ocean.)
Is the flow of energy linear?
How much energy is being lost at each trophic level? What is the majority of energy being lost as and where is it coming from?

Essay Sample Content Preview:

Designing Food Webs
Student’s Name
Institutional Affiliation
Course Name and Number
Professor
Due Date
Designing Food Webs
Food Web 1 (Self as a Tertiary Consumer)
Food Web 2 (Organisms in our Backyard)
Description of the Food Webs
Food webs 1 and 2 show simple food webs in our backyard. These food webs were created with the help of Danielle Johnson’s article, Exploring Nature in Your Own Backyard (Johnson, 2020). With this, I have found that our backyard is not really diverse in terms of the plants and animals that are there. I mainly found some insects like spiders, ants, grasshoppers, beetles, crickets, green grass, and our chickens. Being in a family of professionals, we do not have a diverse backyard because we cannot take care of different kinds of animals that can be higher in the food webs, and there are no known apex predators either in the area. Since my mother is allergic to flowers, we do not have flowering plants as well, hence the lack of diversity in the plants around. Most of what we have are grasses (producers) which are being eaten by some insects (primary consumers). My grandmother lives with us, and she has a very distinct fondness for growing chickens for consumption. Since we have our own chickens in the backyard, we have our own supply of chicken meat, some innards (for my dog), and eggs; hence my family and my dog are the tertiary consumers. The chickens are fed chicken feed, and sometimes they eat insects too, so they become the secondary consumers.
All of these factors affect the food web. Since there are limited consumers at the higher level (second...

Updated on January 26, 2024

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Designing Food Webs

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