Case Study
Chuck Greenwalt
MTH/221
October 26, 2015
THOMAS BLAMEY
Food Webs Food webs are the ecological links that are made up of plants and animals and are the links to predator and pray food chains. Often predators will share similar prey as well as pray sharing similar food chains that are linked back through a food web. Food webs are determined by the available nutrients within the ecological surroundings and constraints. Temperature, rage of food, ample supplies of food and water as well as whether or not conditions are harsh or not determine these constraints.
Competition
Competition and predation are interactions that form the key structural elements of ecological communities (e.g. Chase et al. (2002) and references
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These requirements for a certain life form are considered there ecological niche. To understand this more thoroughly, if we restricted a species in the forest to, a certain level of temperatures, nutrients, and pH levels then we would categorize each factor, such as the minimum temperature and a maximum temperature. We could also do the same with nutrients as well as other constraints such as water temperature or pH within food. As we can see every niche can be measured, have a range established, the space can have a set of values of how likely a species can be found. This is known as ecological phase space, which defines or means that no two species will control the same niche space, but they will compete for …show more content…
The tropic status is also a great way to measure the order of the food chain, from strength to weakness because it is a great way to show, and illustrate which species are in a direct path or prey to another, or what the indirect paths are. However, this is assuming that the tropic status is just like the food web, which is not always the case. This is because in a food web, there may be more than one approach that is possible. Knowing that this is the case with tropic status we need to assume that the food web we used earlier is acyclic, and has no cycles or