A trophic level consists of organisms that get their energy from a similar source. Each step in a food chain is a trophic level. A food chain is a series of organisms each eating or decomposing the preceding organism in the chain. For example, in a...

The trophic structure (from Greek trophos = feeder) of an ecosystem is the arrangement of organisms based on their feeding relationships. All organisms interact with each other through the food web, based on what they eat and what eats them. Thus the...

One way of analyzing the biological relationships within an ecosystem is to describe who eats whom within the system, also called a functional analysis. Each feeding level in an ecosystem is called a trophic level. In the grasslands, for example,...

The so-called "ten percent law," also often called the "law of tens" refers to the idea that at each transfer of energy through a trophic structure, only a small percent of the energy remains available for use by the organism in the next level up in...

In ecology, trophic dynamics is the system of trophic levels (Greek trophē, food) that describe the position that an organism occupies in a food chain - what it eats, and what eats...

The trophic ecology of 11 benthic macroinvertebrate taxa found in Cache Creek, Yellowstone National Park (YNP) was studied to determine if burned organic matter is an important resource and how resource utilization patterns may be altered in post-fire streams. Laboratory food quality experiments were...

The species - area relationship may be the strongest empirical generalization in community ecology. We explore the effect of trophic rank upon the "strength" of the species - area relationship, as measured by z, the slope of a log(species) vs. log(area) plot. We present...