Document Type
Contribution to Book
Journal/Book Title/Conference
Sanak Island, Alaska - A Natural and Cultural History
Publisher
Idaho Museum of Natural History
Publication Date
8-2012
Journal Article Version
Version of Record
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
First Page
88
Last Page
99
Abstract
Almost everyone learns about the concept of ecological "food chains" in grade school. An example of a marine food chain is shown on the left-hand side of the chart to the left: phytoplankton are eaten by mussels, which are eaten by octopus, which are eaten by sea otters, which are eaten by humans. These feeding interactions can be abstractly represented as five "nodes" connected in a single chain by four links, as shown on the right-hand side of the diagram to the left. The food chain shown is one of the thousands of interlinked food chains that make up the "food web" of the Sanak Archipelago intertidal ecosystem (the diagram on the next page). Food webs refer to the complex networks of feeding ("trophic") interactions among species that co-occur within particular habitats. Food webs ideally represent whole communities of species including plants, bacteria, fungi, invertebrates, and vertebrates. Feeding links show the pathways by which biomass is transferred between species (see left), and such links represent a variety of strategies including detritivory, herbivory, predation, cannibalism, and parasitism.
Recommended Citation
Reedy, Katherine & Maschner, Herbert. (2012). Sanak Island, Alaska: A Natural and Cultural History.