Trophic Level

The trophic level of an organism is the position it occupies in a food web. A food chain is a succession of organisms that eat other organisms and may, in turn, be eaten themselves. The trophic level of an organism is the number of steps it is from the start of the chain. A food web starts at trophic level 1 with primary producers such as plants, can move to herbivores at level 2, carnivores at level 3 or higher, and typically finish with apex predators at level 4 or 5. The path along the chain can form either a one-way flow or a food "web". Ecological communities with higher biodiversity form more complex trophic paths.

The word ''trophic'' derives from the Greek τροφή (trophē) referring to food or nourishment.

History

The concept of trophic level was developed by Raymond Lindeman (1942), based on the terminology of August Thienemann (1926): "producers", "consumers" and "reducers" (modified to "decomposers" by Lindeman).

Overview

The three basic ways in which organisms get food are as producers, consumers, and decomposers.

* Producers ( autotrophs) are typically plants or algae. Plants and algae do not usually eat other organisms, but pull nutrients from the soil or the ocean and manufacture their own food using photosynthesis. For this reason, they are called primary producers. In this way, it is energy from the sun that usually powers the base of the food chain. An exception occurs in deep-sea hydrothermal ecosystems, where there is no sunlight. Here primary producers manufacture food through a process called chemosynthesis.
* Consumers (heterotrophs) are species that cannot manufacture their own food and need to consume other organisms. Animals that eat primary producers (like plants) are called herbivores. Animals that eat other animals are called carnivores, and animals that eat both plants and other animals are called omnivores.
* Decomposers ( detritivores) break down dead plant and animal material and wastes and release it again as energy and nutrients into the ecosystem for recycling. Decomposers, such as bacteria and fungi (mushrooms), feed on waste and dead matter, converting it into inorganic chemicals that can be recycled as mineral nutrients for plants to use again.
Trophic levels can be represented by numbers, starting at level 1 with plants. Further trophic levels are numbered subsequently according to how far the organism is along the food chain.

* Level 1: Plants and algae make their own food and are called producers.
* Level 2: Herbivores eat plants and are called primary consumers.
* Level 3: Carnivores that eat herbivores are called secondary consumers.
* Level 4: Carnivores that eat other carnivores are called tertiary consumers.
* Apex predators by definition have no predators and are at the top of their food web.

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In real-world ecosystems, there is more than one food chain for most organisms, since most organisms eat more than one kind of food or are eaten by more than one type of predator. A diagram that sets out the intricate network of intersecting and overlapping food chains for an ecosystem is called its food web. Decomposers are often left off food webs, but if included, they mark the end of a food chain. Thus food chains start with primary producers and end with decay and decomposers. Since decomposers recycle nutrients, leaving them so they can be reused by primary producers, they are sometimes regarded as occupying their own trophic level.

The trophic level of a species may vary if it has a choice of diet. Virtually all plants and phytoplankton are purely phototrophic and are at exactly level 1.0. Many worms are at around 2.1; insects 2.2; jellyfish 3.0; birds 3.6. A 2013 study estimates the average trophic level of human beings at 2.21, similar to pigs or anchovies.
*

where $Y_$ is the catch of the species or group i in year y, and $TL_i$ is the trophic level for species i as defined above.

Fish at higher trophic levels usually have a higher economic value, which can result in overfishing at the higher trophic levels. Earlier reports found precipitous declines in mean trophic level of fisheries catch, in a process known as fishing down the food web. However, more recent work finds no relation between economic value and trophic level; and that mean trophic levels in catches, surveys and stock assessments have not in fact declined, suggesting that fishing down the food web is not a global phenomenon. However Pauly et al. note that trophic levels peaked at 3.4 in 1970 in the northwest and west-central Atlantic, followed by a subsequent decline to 2.9 in 1994. They report a shift away from long-lived, piscivorous, high-trophic-level bottom fishes, such as cod and haddock, to short-lived, planktivorous, low-trophic-level invertebrates (e.g., shrimps) and small, pelagic fish (e.g., herrings). This shift from high-trophic-level fishes to low-trophic-level invertebrates and fishes is a response to changes in the relative abundance of the preferred catch. They consider that this is part of the global fishery collapse, which finds an echo in the overfished Mediterranean SeaFishing Down the Mediterranean Food Webs? Executive Summary. (2000). Briand, F. and K.I. Stergio

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Humans have a mean trophic level of about 2.21, about the same as a pig or an anchovy."Researchers calculate human trophic level for first time"
''Phys.org ''. 3 December 2013.Bonhommeau, S., Dubroca, L., Le Pape, O., Barde, J., Kaplan, D.M., Chassot, E. and Nieblas, A.E. (2013) "Eating up the world's food web and the human trophic level". ''Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences'', 110(51): 20617–20620. .

FiB index

Since biomass Ecological efficiency, transfer efficiencies are only about 10%, it follows that the rate of biological production is much greater at lower trophic levels than it is at higher levels. Fisheries catch, at least, to begin with, will tend to increase as the trophic level declines. At this point the fisheries will target species lower in the food web. In 2000, this led Pauly and others to construct a "Fisheries in Balance" index, usually called the FiB index. The FiB index is defined, for any year ''y'', by

:: $FiB_y=\log\frac$

where $Y_y$ is the catch at year ''y'', $TL_y$ is the mean trophic level of the catch at year ''y'', $Y_0$ is the catch, $TL_0$ the mean trophic level of the catch at the start of the series being analyzed, and $TE$ is the transfer efficiency of biomass or energy between trophic levels.

The FiB index is stable (zero) over periods of time when changes in trophic levels are matched by appropriate changes in the catch in the opposite direction. The index increases if catches increase for any reason, e.g. higher fish biomass, or geographic expansion. Such decreases explain the "backward-bending" plots of trophic level versus catch originally observed by Pauly and others in 1998.

Tritrophic and other interactions

One aspect of trophic levels is called tritrophic interaction. Ecologists often restrict their research to two trophic levels as a way of simplifying the analysis; however, this can be misleading if tritrophic interactions (such as plant–herbivore–predator) are not easily understood by simply adding pairwise interactions (plant-herbivore plus herbivore–predator, for example). Significant interactions can occur between the first trophic level (plant) and the third trophic level (a predator) in determining herbivore population growth, for example. Simple genetic changes may yield morphological variants in plants that then differ in their resistance to herbivores because of the effects of the plant architecture on enemies of the herbivore. Plants can also develop defenses against herbivores such as chemical defenses.

See also

* Cascade effect
* Energy flow (ecology)
* Marine trophic level
* Mesopredator release hypothesis
* Trophic cascade
* Trophic state index – applied to lakes
* Trophic dynamics – ''Food web''

References

External links

Trophic levels
BBC. Last updated March 2004.

{{DEFAULTSORT:Trophic Level
Fisheries science
Ecology