This is a basic picture representing the basic different animals and their amounts in an ecosystem. It represents how the lowest level of animal, or in this case a plant (a wheat field) is the most abundant. As you go up in the food chain to the mice who eat the wheat, there are fewer mice than wheat. There are fewer snakes than mice. And the next level in the food chain is the hawk who usually should be less than the amount of snakes but in this representation they are the same quantity.

This is because the mice each eat a few stalks of grain in their whole life. All together the mice do not eat all of the grain because not all of it is edible to them.

This is a basic chart displaying different levels in an ecosystem and how the energy is distributed. As you can see the lowest level is a plant of some kind (called the producer). The next level is often a herbivore who only eats plants, then the carnivore and last the decomposer which is like bacteria which decomposes dead matter. More ecosystems have more levels than this like maybe a second carnivore (one which eats the lower carnivore in food chain) or a scavenger. The size of the box represents the amount of energy the level has. The reason that the level decreases by about 90% each time is because one level eats the other so they obtain the energy but they cannot always eat all of the other animals energy like maybe the bones or excrement of the animal over its' life time.

Back to Top