Ecology Vocabulary
Use vocabulary for feeding relationships and ecological roles: producer, consumer, predator, prey, herbivore, carnivore, omnivore, decomposer, food chain, food web, nutrient cycle, and describe how energy and matter flow through ecosystems using these terms
What a learner can do afterwards
- Construct a food chain correctly using producer, consumer, predator, and prey in the right positions
- Distinguish between herbivore, carnivore, and omnivore with correct examples from a given ecosystem
- Explain what a decomposer does and why it matters, using the correct vocabulary
1 · Read
Every living thing has a role in getting energy. A producer makes its own food. Plants are producers: they use sunlight to make food in their leaves. A consumer cannot make its own food, so it eats other living things to get energy.
Consumers get more specific names based on what they eat. A herbivore eats only plants, like a deer. A carnivore eats only other animals, like a lion. An omnivore eats both plants and animals, like a raccoon.
When a leaf falls and dies, a decomposer breaks it down. Mushrooms and tiny bacteria in the soil are decomposers. They turn dead leaves and animals back into nutrients that plants can use to grow again.
A food chain is one straight line of eating, like grass to rabbit to fox, and its energy begins with sunlight caught by the producer. Most animals eat more than one thing, so many food chains link into a food web. If the producers in a habitat disappeared, the plant-eaters would have no food. When decomposers return nutrients to the soil, that whole loop is called a nutrient cycle.
Energy flows from producer to consumer to predator, and decomposers return everything to the soil so the cycle can start again.
More to read
46.2 Energy Flow through Ecosystems
Ecologists sort living things by how they get energy. A producer makes its own food from sunlight, like grass or an oak tree. A consumer gets energy by eating, like a rabbit or a fox. In a food chain the producer always comes first.
Consumers split into smaller groups. A herbivore eats only plants. A carnivore eats only animals. An omnivore eats both. A rabbit is a herbivore, a hawk is a carnivore, and a bear is an omnivore.
Key points: Matter and energy in food webs
Food chains are about matter as well as energy. Matter means the tiny building blocks that make up bodies. When a rabbit eats grass, the grass matter becomes rabbit matter. When a fox eats the rabbit, it becomes fox matter.
Nothing is wasted. When living things breathe out or pass waste, matter goes back to the air and soil. Producers take it up again. So matter cycles round and round while energy flows one way along the chain.
Learn: Food chains & food webs
Two more words finish your ecology toolkit. A predator is a hunter that catches and eats other animals. Its prey is the animal it catches. In grass to rabbit to fox, the fox is the predator and the rabbit is its prey. The rabbit is not a predator. It is a consumer and a herbivore, because it eats plants.
The last hero is the decomposer. Fungi and bacteria break down dead bodies and fallen leaves. Without them, dead stuff would pile up forever and nutrients would stay locked away. Decomposers return the building blocks to the soil so producers can grow again.
Explore more
2 · Watch
به انگلیسیTake it off screen
Where it sits
Learn first
Where this leads
Jobs that lean on this skill. Follow one to see everything it is built on.
24 questions wait behind this lesson, each with its answer explained. Every answer feeds the sky: stars light as they are learned, and dim when it is time to come back.