What is the food chain of the ocean?
The marine ecosystem is made up of a complicated series interconnected energy producers—like plants and photoplankton—and consumers—from plant-eaters to meat-eaters, both great and small.
What is a basic food chain in the open ocean?
Next. Open oceans are home to a variety of living things – from microscopic plankton to gigantic fish and mammals. Tiny plant organisms called phytoplankton drift in surface waters and convert sunlight into food, which is eaten by masses of tiny animals called zooplankton.
What is an example of a marine food chain?
Chaetognaths and comb jellies eat the smaller larval fish, while larval crabs and small juvenile fish eat the chaetognaths. Large fish eat small fish. Dolphins, sharks and sea birds eat large fish. Baleen whales and whale sharks, although very large, eat zooplankton.
What are 4 primary consumers in the ocean?
Primary consumers in the ocean include zooplankton, small fish, and crustaceans. The secondary consumers are fish, coral, penguins, whales, and other species that eat the zooplankton. The top predators in the ocean, sharks, killer whales, and leopard seals, eat both primary and secondary consumers.
Where does energy begin in a food chain?
producers
The food chain begins with producers, organisms such as green plants, that can make their own food. Through photosynthesis, producers convert solar energy to chemical energy, energy in the chemical bonds of the food.
What is the food chain of a shark?
Sharks are also scavengers. They eat dead fish and mammals or any other meat they can get. They also eat trash, especially metal, like license plates and suits of armor which they are attracted too because of the electromagnetivity of the metal.
Are humans at top of food chain?
It’s a platitude that we’ve all heard dozens of times, whether to justify our treatment of other species or simply to celebrate a carnivorous lifestyle: humans are the top of the food chain. Ecologists, though, have a statistical way of calculating a species’ trophic level—its level, or rank, in a food chain.
Are sharks Detritivores?
In the ocean, of course one of the greatest carnivores is the great white shark. There are scavengers and detritivores that feed on dead plants and animals, such as a hagfish feeding on a dead whale in the deep ocean.
What is the beginning of an ocean food chain?
A food chain in the ocean begins with tiny one-celled organisms called diatoms, which make their own food from sunlight. Shrimplike creatures eat the diatoms.
What is the primary producer in the food chain of the ocean?
Phytoplankton, the ocean’s primary producers, are the foundation of the marine food chain. They “produce” energy from non-living (abiotic) stuff, like sunlight and inorganic chemicals. Almost every other living thing in the marine biosphere “consumes” the energy initially created by phytoplankton.
What animals are in the ocean food chain?
Barracuda, groupers, snappers, sharks, moray eels, and dolphins are at the top of the food chain. Their feast includes other fish, crustaceans, and even octopi.
What is the first link in the ocean food chain?
Phytoplankton is the first link in the oceanic food chain. It is eaten by zooplankton which is in turn eaten by other animals, which are then consumed by yet further sea creatures. Sometimes that chain can be quite short — the only thing that separates whales from phytoplankton in the food chain, for example, are the krill that come in between.