What is the difference of food webs and food chain?

Question

I need to know what the difference ASAP!!!

Answer 1

FOOD CHAINS FOLLOW A SINGLE PATH AS
ANIMALS EAT EACH OTHER.

EXAMPLE:
GRASS (is eaten by a) GRASSHOPPER (which is eaten by) a FROG (which is eaten by a) SNAKE (which is eaten by a) HAWK

FOOD WEBS SHOW HOW MANY ANIMALS ARE INTERCONNECTED BY DIFFERENT PATHS.

EXAMPLE:
TREES produce acorns which act as food for many MICE and INSECTS. Because there are many MICE, the WEASELS, SNAKES, and RACOONS, have food. The insects in the acorns also attract BIRDS, SKUNKS, and OPOSSUMS. With the SKUNKS, OPPOSUMS, WEASELS and MICE around, HAWKS, FOXES, and OWLS can find food. They are all connected!

FOOD WEBS show how plants and animals are connected in many ways to help them all survive. FOOD CHAINS follow just one path as animals find food.

Answer 2

Food chains are linear 1 eats 2 which eats 3 which eats 4.

Food webs come closer to real life and look like a spider web with lines showing who eats what and animals at the intersections of lines. Go here for a picture: http://www.accs.net/users/kriel/chapter%20three/food_web.jpg


Look up the wikipedia entries on both for more info.

Answer 3

Food webs do not show a heirarchy - they merely depict what neads what - this it doesn't give a clear understanding of primary producers, primary consumers, secondary consumers etc....and it is not as easy to understand ecological balance from it....it's however helpful in understanding the importance of habitat and the interdependence between species

However one cannot understand this interdependence from a food chain which will categorise all primary producers, consumers etc. together and will help in the understanding of interdependence between various types of creatures but not in species specifically. It helps to understand the concept of ecological imbalance and the effects of the extinction of one type of consumer on the rest of the food chain

Example: Food web: A fish can be connected with a bird that eats it and other fish that it eats and that ird will be connected with a type of cat that feeds on that bird...etc... It is no heirarchy....

However in a food chain at the basic level are the primary producers, mainly the plants that use the solar energy to produce life sustaining food not just for itself but also for primary consumers....
then there r the secondary consumers and so on...

Answer 4

Okay, a food chain is just one path. a caterpillar eats a moth, and a fox eats the caterpillar. A food web is made of of food chains, and expands on them- the fox also eats a bird, a squirrel, and the squirrel eats a fish, and the fish eats a moth, etc. It gets more complicated, like a web.

Answer 5

Food web- Web of different foods eaten by species.... and where they come from..


Food chain- Which species eat which animals as food.

Answer 6

a food web shows all the predator/prey relationships in a given ecosystem along with how they affect other species. while a food chain shows the interactions of a limited number of species.

Answer 7

Food chain


A food chain describes a single pathway that energy and nutrients may follow in an ecosystem. There is one organism per trophic level, and trophic levels are therefore easily defined. They usually start with a primary producer and end with a top predator. Here is an example of a food chain:

phytoplankton → copepod → fish → squid → seal → killer whale
This "chain" can be described as follows:

killer whales feed upon seals, that feed upon squid, that eat small fish, that feed on copepods, that feed on microscopic algae.

In this example, algae—autotrophs by virtue of their ability to photosynthesize—are the base of the food chain. It is always the case that numbers—or at least biomass—decreases from the base of the chain to the top. In other words, the number and mass of phytoplankton cells are much greater than the number and mass of copepods being supported by the phytoplankton. Viewed another way: to support one killer whale requires many seals, large numbers of squid, huge numbers of fish, and so on down the chain (see energy pyramid). This is because, with each transfer, some of the energy is lost to the environment. On average, only 10% of the organism's energy is passed on to its predator.

Food chains are overly simplistic as representatives of what typically happens in nature. The food chain shows only one pathway of energy and material transfer. Most consumers feed on multiple species and are, in turn, fed upon by multiple other species. The relations of detritivores and parasites are seldom adequately characterized in such chains as well.


Food web


A food web or food network extends food chain concept from a simple linear pathway to a complex network of interactions. The direct steps as shown in the food chain example above seldom reflect reality. This "web" makes it possible to show much bigger animals (like a whale) eating very small organisms (like plankton). Food sources of most species in an ecosystem are much more diverse, resulting in a complex web of relationships.


Kindly click on the blue links below to see the picture of A food web.

As a picture/ digram can not be directly projected in yahoo answers.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_chain

http://images.google.co.in/images?hl=en&q=food+web&btnG=Search+Images

http://192.171.163.165/images/education/Key%20Stage%204/images/food%20chain.jpg