Food chains (Ecology) (Topical Term)

Turner, K.R. Effects of fish predation on benthic communities in the San Juan Archipelago, 2015: p. iv (Trophic cascades are common in temperate marine ecosystems, often mediated by predators consuming urchins and urchins grazing on kelp. ... Despite some limited evidence of co-variance between the predatory fishes and the other groups, the species involved did not suggest trophic relationships as the causal agent) p. 49 (Top-down control is common in marine food webs, and can be manifested in trophic cascades affecting multiple trophic levels)

Garvey, J.E. Trophic ecology, 2017.

Weaver, D.C. Community structure and trophic ecology of fishes on the Pinnacles Reef Tract, 2002.

McGraw-Hill dictionary of scientific & technical terms, ©2003 (trophic ecology: The study of the feeding relationships of organisms in communities and ecosystems; food chain: The scheme of feeding relationships by trophic levels which unites the member species of a biological community; food web: A modified food chain that expresses feeding relationships at various, changing trophic levels)

McGraw-Hill concise encyclopedia of bioscience, ©2002 (Trophic ecology. The study of the structure of feeding relationships among organisms in an ecosystem. Researchers focus on the interplay between feeding relationships and ecosystem attributes such as nutrient cycling, physical disturbance, or the rate of tissue production by plants and the accrual of detritus (dead organic material). Feeding or trophic relationships can be represented as a food web or as a food chain. Food webs depict trophic links between all species sampled in a habitat, whereas food chains simplify this complexity into linear arrays of interactions among trophic levels. Thus, trophic levels (for example, plants, herbivores, detritivores, and carnivores) are amalgamations of species that have similar feeding habits. (However, not all species consume prey on a single trophic level. Omnivores are species that feed on more than one trophic level.). The three fundamental questions in the field of trophic ecology are: (1) What is the relationship between the length of food chains and plant biomass (the relative total amount of plants at the bottom of the food chain)? (2) How do resource supply to producers (plants) and resource demand by predators determine the relative abundance of organisms at each trophic level in a food chain? (3) How long are real food chains, and what factors limit food chain length?)