A food web is a graphical description of feeding relationships among species in an ecological

community, that is, of who eats whom (Fig. 1). It is also a means of showing how energy and
materials (e.g., carbon) flow through a community of species as a result of these feeding
relationships. Typically, species are connected by lines or arrows called "links", and the species
are sometimes referred to as "nodes" in food web diagrams.

Figure 1. A coastal food web in Alaska based on primary production by phytoplankton, and
ending in predators of both land and sea. (Image courtesy U.S. Geological Survey)

The pioneering animal ecologist Charles Elton (1927) introduced the concept of the food web
(which he called food cycle) to general ecological science. As he described it: "The herbivores
are usually preyed upon by carnivores, which get the energy of the sunlight at third-hand, and
these again may be preyed upon by other carnivores, and so on, until we reach an animal which
has no enemies, and which forms, as it were, a terminus on this food cycle. There are, in fact,
chains of animals linked together by food, and all dependent in the long run upon plants. We
refer to these as 'food-chains', and to all the food chains in a community as the 'food-cycle.'"

A food web differs from a food chain in that the latter shows only a portion of the food web
involving a simple, linear series of species (e.g., predator, herbivore, plant) connected by feeding
links. A food web aims to depict a more complete picture of the feeding relationships, and can be
considered a bundle of many interconnected food chains occurring within the community. All
species occupying the same position within a food chain comprise a trophic level within the food
web. For instance, all of the plants in the foodweb comprise the first or "primary producer" tropic
level, all herbivores comprise the second or "primary consumer" trophic level, and carnivores
that eat herbivores comprise the third or "secondary consumer" trophic level. Additional levels,
in which carnivores eat other carnivores, comprise a tertiary trophic level.
Elton emphasized early on that food chains tend to show characteristic patterns of increasing
body size as one moves up the food chain, for example from phytoplankton to invertebrate
grazers to fishes, or from insects to rodents to larger carnivores like foxes. Because individuals
of small-bodied species require less energy and food than individuals of larger-bodied species, a
given amount of energy can support a greater number of individuals of the smaller-bodied
species. Hence, ecological communities typically show what Elton called a pyramid of numbers
(later dubbed the Eltonian pyramid), in which the species at lower trophic levels in the food web
tend to be more numerous than those at higher trophic levels.

Figure 2. Food webs, at least pelagic webs based on phytoplankton, show a characteristic
relationships between body size, biomass, and trophic level. This figure shows the food web of
Tuesday Lake, USA, plotted as a function of numerical abundance and body mass of each
species, which are represented by numbered symbols. Note that both axes use a log scale. Circles
represent phytoplankton, squares represent zooplankton, and diamonds represent fish. Higher
numbers correspond to species higher in the food web. (From Cohen et al. (2003))

A second reason for the pyramid of numbers is low ecological efficiency: some energy is lost at
each transfer between consumer and prey, such that the energy that reaches top predators is a
very small fraction of that available in the plants at the base of the food web. Although there is
wide variation among types of organisms and types of ecosystems, a general rule of thumb is that
available energy decreases by about an order of magnitude at each step in the food chain. That is,
only about 10% of the energy harvested by plants is consumed and converted into herbivore
biomass, only 10% of that makes it into biomass of primary carnivores, and so on. Thus, the
structure of food webs is dictated in part by basic constraints set by thermodynamics. The
predictable dissipation of energy at each step in food chains is one of the factors thought to limit
the length of most food chains to a maximum of four or five steps. Cohen et al. (2003)
emphasized that the correlations among body size, abundance, and trophic level produce a
characteristic trivariate structure to (pelagic) food webs (Fig. 2).

The pyramid of numbers is less obvious at the most basal levels in terrestrial communities based
on trees, which are typically much larger than the herbivores that feed on them. Pyramids of
numbers or biomass may even be inverted in cases where the microscopic plants that support the
web show very rapid turnover, that is, where they grow and are eaten so rapidly that there is less
plant biomass than herbivore biomass present at a given time.

Decomposers are an assemblage of small organisms, including invertebrates, fungi, and bacteria,
that do not fit neatly into any trophic level because they consume dead biomass of organisms
from all trophic levels. Decomposers are a critical component of the food web, however, because
they recycle nutrients that otherwise would become sequestered in accumulating detritus.

Evolution
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This article is about evolution in biology. For other uses, see Evolution (disambiguation).

For a generally accessible and less technical introduction to the topic, see Introduction to
evolution.
Part of the Biology series on

Evolution
Mechanisms and processes
Adaptation
Genetic drift
Gene flow
Mutation
Natural selection
Speciation
Research and history
Introduction
Evidence
Evolutionary history of life
History
Level of support
Modern synthesis
Objections / Controversy
Social effect
 Theory and fact
Evolutionary biology fields
Cladistics
Ecological genetics
Evolutionary anthropology
Evolutionary development
Evolutionary psychology
Molecular evolution
Phylogenetics
Population genetics
Systematics
Biology portal · v • d • e 

Evolution (also known as biological, genetic or organic evolution) is the change in the
inherited traits of a population of organisms through successive generations.[1] This change
results from interactions between processes that introduce variation into a population, and other
processes that remove it. As a result, variants with particular traits become more, or less,
common. A trait is a particular characteristic—anatomical, biochemical or behavioural—that is
the result of gene–environment interaction.

The main source of variation is mutation, which introduces genetic changes. These changes are
heritable (can be passed on through reproduction), and may give rise to alternative traits in
organisms. Another source of variation is genetic recombination, which shuffles the genes into
new combinations which can result in organisms exhibiting different traits. Under certain
circumstances, variation can also be increased by the transfer of genes between species,[2][3] and
by the extremely rare, but significant, wholesale incorporation of genomes through
endosymbiosis.[4][5]

Two main processes cause variants to become more common or rarer in a population. One is
natural selection, through which traits that aid survival and reproduction become more common,
while traits that hinder survival and reproduction become rarer. Natural selection occurs because
only a small proportion of individuals in each generation will survive and reproduce, since
resources are limited and organisms produce many more offspring than their environment can
support. Over many generations, heritable variation in traits is filtered by natural selection and
the beneficial changes are successively retained through differential survival and reproduction.
This iterative process adjusts traits so they become better suited to an organism's environment:
these adjustments are called adaptations.[6]

However, not all change is adaptive. Another cause of evolution is genetic drift, which leads to
random changes in how common traits are in a population. Genetic drift is most important when
traits do not strongly influence survival—particularly so in small populations, in which chance
plays a disproportionate role in the frequency of traits passed on to the next generation.[7][8]
Genetic drift is important in the neutral theory of molecular evolution, and plays a role in the
molecular clocks that are used in phylogenetic studies.
A key process in evolution is speciation, in which a single ancestral species splits and diversifies
into multiple new species. There are several modes through which this occurs. Ultimately, all
living (and extinct) species are descended from a common ancestor via a long series of
speciation events. These events stretch back in a diverse "tree of life" which has grown over the
3.5 billion years during which life has existed on Earth.[9][10][11][12] This is visible in anatomical,
genetic and other similarities between groups of organisms, geographical distribution of related
species, the fossil record and the recorded genetic changes in living organisms over many
generations.

Evolutionary biologists document the fact that evolution occurs, and also develop and test
theories which explain its causes. The study of evolutionary biology began in the mid-nineteenth
century, when research into the fossil record and the diversity of living organisms convinced
most scientists that species changed over time.[13] The mechanism driving these changes
remained unclear until the theory of natural selection was independently proposed by Charles
Darwin and Alfred Wallace. In 1859, Darwin's seminal work On the Origin of Species brought
the new theory of evolution by natural selection to a wide audience,[14] leading to the
overwhelming acceptance of evolution among scientists.[15][16][17][18]

In the 1930s, Darwinian natural selection became understood in combination with Mendelian
inheritance, forming the modern evolutionary synthesis,[19] which connected the substrate of
evolution (inherited genetics) and the mechanism of evolution (natural selection). This powerful
explanatory and predictive theory has become the central organizing principle of modern
biology, directing research and providing a unifying explanation for the history and diversity of
life on Earth.[16][17][20] Evolution is applied and studied in fields as diverse as agriculture,
anthropology, conservation biology, ecology, medicine, paleontology, philosophy, and
psychology along with other specific topics in the previous listed fields.