Food Web Complexity

How does food web complexity affect the biodiversity of an ecosystem? Before we were given the question, we were taught that biodiversity is about relative abundance and species richness. Just recently we learned about the transfer of energy in food webs, while also learning more about trophic levels. Looking at how much energy you gain and how much an organism needs, I learned that eating straight off a source of plants would help organisms grow and prosper. For our group we examined the producers of the ecosystem who are at the bottom and are eaten the most. We also know which consumer would need the most energy, which would be the Tertiary consumer. We also learned about how important each species is due to the fact that if it were to disappear they wouldn’t be eaten and cause a rise or fall of an animal. Our goal was to find evidence to prove our claim was correct or if not ,why. For our procedure we looked at plants and changed the consumer. If a herbivore ate a plant the populations would stay the same no matter what herbivore in the webiste. The same goes for omnivores. What I could compare it to was when I created a food chain to see if the transfer of energy and the top predator needing more …show more content…
From this I can sort of guess what would happen to the other animals as you can see that my claim is most likely correct. If I were to do this lab again, I would try to find out how biodiversity rises and lowers as a whole with a lot of different connections. But, if I were to do something similar to what I did here i would want to see if the animal with more choices, such as an omnivore would survive, if it was put into the same situation I put the herbivores into. Except I would make the omnivore consume the herbivores. I would also look more into how the size of the predator and how fast they starve would affect if they