A simple marine food chain, then, might look like this (sound of writing on board): the top predator, trophic level number 4, is a herring. Herring fish eat level 3, carnivorous zooplankton. The carnivorous zooplankton eat trophic level 2, herbivorous zooplankton. And herbivorous zooplankton eat level number 1, phytoplankton, which is a type of autotroph. In marine food chains, energy transfer is not very efficient. Phytoplankton utilize only about one percent of the energy available from the sun. Between 70 and 90 percent of the energy made by producers or eaten by heterotrophs is used in their bodies or expelled as waste. This leaves only 10 to 30 percent that's retained in the body's biomass and available for consumers at the next highest trophic level. Thus, the biomass at each trophic level is controlled by the efficiency of the energy transfer. At the lowest trophic level, animals will generally have high biomass, and there will be lots of small producers. At the highest trophic level, animals will generally have low biomass, and there will be only a few large animals.<br><br>Now, let's expand our simple food chain into a food web. In this web, a herring is no longer a trophic-4 predator. There is a bigger fish, um...a tuna, that eats the herring. But there is an even bigger animal that eats the tuna. And that is...?
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