Ecosystem

An ecosystem consists of the biological community that occurs in some locale, and the physical and chemical factors that make up its non-living or abiotic environment.

The study of ecosystems mainly consists of the study of certain processes that link the living, or biotic, components to the non-living, or abiotic, components. Energy transformations and biogeochemical cycling are the main processes that comprise the field of ecosystem ecology.

Studies of individuals are concerned mostly about physiology, reproduction, development or behavior, and studies of populations usually focus on the habitat and resource needs of individual species, their group behaviors, population growth, and what limits their abundance or causes extinction. Studies of communities examine how populations of many species interact with one another, such as predators and their prey, or competitors that share common needs or resources.
In ecosystem ecology we put all of this together and, insofar as we can, we try to understand how the system operates as a whole. This means that, rather than worrying mainly about particular species, we try to focus on major functional aspects of the system. These functional aspects include such things as the amount of energy that is produced by photosynthesis, how energy or materials flow along the many steps in a food chain, or what controls the rate of decomposition of materials or the rate at which nutrients are recycled in the system.

Components of an Ecosystem
Aiotic components
Sunlight Temperature Precipitation Water or Moisture Soil

Biotic components

Primary producers Herbivores Carnivores Ominvores Detritivores

Processes of Ecosystem

ecosystems have energy flows

ecosystems cycle materials

Energy flows and material cycle

The Transformation of Energy

The transformations of energy in an ecosystem begin first with the input of energy from the sun. Energy from the sun is captured by the process of photosynthesis. Carbon dioxide is combined with hydrogen (derived from the splitting of water molecules) to produce carbohydrates (CHO). Energy is stored in the high energy bonds of adenosine triphosphate, or ATP (see lecture on photosynthesis).

The prophet Isaah said "all flesh is grass", earning him the title of first ecologist, because virtually all energy available to organisms originates in plants.
Because it is the first step in the production of energy for living things, it is called primary production. Herbivores obtain their energy by consuming plants or plant products, carnivores eat herbivores, and detritivores consume the droppings and carcasses of us all.

Food Chain
Food Chain is the sequence of populations of an ecosystem which allows food and energy to go through it in a specified direction.

Those on the lower end of chain become food for the ones who are on upper end. The one who is at top of the food chain is not consumed by any.

Food Chain
Energy from the sun, captured by plant photosynthesis, flows from trophic level to trophic level via the food chain.
A trophic level is composed of organisms that make a living in the same way, that is they are all primary producers (plants), primary consumers (herbivores) or secondary consumers (carnivores). Dead tissue and waste products are produced at all levels. Scavengers, detritivores, and decomposers collectively account for the use of all such "waste" -- consumers of carcasses and fallen leaves may be other animals, such as crows and beetles, but ultimately it is the microbes that finish the job of decomposition. Not surprisingly, the amount of primary production varies a great deal from place to place, due to differences in the amount of solar radiation and the availability of nutrients and water.

Types of food chains

Plant eating animal is eaten by a flesh eating animal
A smaller organism consumes part of a larger host and may itself be parasitized by even smaller organisms Micro organisms live on dead organic matter

Predator Chain

Parasite Chain

Saprophytic Chain

Components of a food chain

Producers Consumers first second tertiary and the fourth order Decomposers

The Producers
Producers are the beginning of a simple food chain. Producers are plants and vegetables. Plants are at the beginning of every food chain that involves the Sun. All energy comes from the Sun and plants are the ones who make food with that energy. They use the process of photosynthesis. Plants also make loads of other nutrients for other organisms to eat. There are also photosynthetic protists that start food chains. You might find them floating on the surface of the ocean acting as food for small unicellular animals

Consumers
Primary Consumers or Herbivores
They are the plant eaters of the chain Example: Mouse

Secondary Consumers or Carnivores

Secondary consumers eat the primary consumers. Example: Cat

Tertiary consumer or Omnivores

These are consumers that eat the secondary and primary consumers Example: Wolf

Decomposers
Whenever something that was alive dies, the decomposers get it. Decomposers break down nutrients in the dead "stuff" and return it to the soil. The producers can then use the nutrients and elements once it's in the soil.

The decomposers complete the system, returning essential molecules to the producers.

However
Energy transfer through the food chain is inefficient. In many circumstances the principal energy input is not green plants but dead organic matter. These are called detritus food chains. the organization of biological systems is much more complicated than can be represented by a simple "chain". There are many food links and chains in an ecosystem, and we refer to all of these linkages as a food web. Food webs can be very complicated, where it appears that "everything is connected to everything else", and it is important to understand what are the most important linkages in any particular food web.

Why there are more herbivores than carnivores

In a food chain, energy is passed from one link to another. When a herbivore eats, only a fraction of the energy (that it gets from the plant food) becomes new body mass; the rest of the energy is lost as waste or used up by the herbivore to carry out its life processes (e.g., movement, digestion, reproduction). Therefore, when the herbivore is eaten by a carnivore, it passes only a small amount of total energy (that it has received) to the carnivore. Of the energy transferred from the herbivore to the carnivore, some energy will be "wasted" or "used up" by the carnivore.

The carnivore then has to eat many herbivores to get enough energy to grow.
Because of the large amount of energy that is lost at each link, the amount of energy that is transferred gets lesser and lesser ...

The further along the food chain you go, the less food remains available
The energy pyramid alongside shows many trees & shrubs providing food and energy to giraffes. As we go up, there are fewer giraffes than trees & shrubs and even fewer lions than giraffes ... as we go further along a food chain, there are fewer and fewer consumers.

In other words, a large mass of living things at the base is required to support a few at the top ... many herbivores are needed to support a few carnivores

Most food chains have no more than four or five links

There cannot be too many links in a single food chain because the animals at the end of the chain would not get enough food (and hence energy) to stay alive. Most animals are part of more than one food chain and eat more than one kind of food in order to meet their food and energy requirements. These interconnected food chains form a food web.

Food Web
In nature, food chain relationships are not isolated. They are very complex, as one organism may form the food source of many organisms. Thus, instead of a simple linear food chain, there is a web like structure formed by these interlinked food chains. Such interconnected matrix of food chains is called 'food web'. Food web can be defined as, "a network of food chains which are interconnected at various trophic levels, so as to form a number of feeding connections amongst different organisms of a biotic community". Food webs are indispensable in ecosystems as they allow an organism to obtain its food from more than one type of organism of the lower trophic level.

 Generally, a food web operates according to taste and food preferences of the organism, yet availability of food source and other compulsions are equally important.

A Food Web in Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecosystem

Case Study: Bat disease could allow insects to destroy crops

A deadly disease to bats could become a major financial headache for agriculture, costing Ohio farmers as much as $1.7 billion a year. A new study is the first to tie a dollar value to the millions of crop-damaging insects that bats routinely devour each year. Now, the night-flying hunters face the threat of a fungal disease that kills most of the bats it infects.

White Nose Syndrome

White-nose syndrome, named for the fungus that spreads over bats while they hibernate, has killed at least 1 million bats in 15 states and Canada since it was discovered in New York in 2006.

On March 30, Ohio officials announced that they found the disease among bats hibernating in an abandoned limestone mine in the Wayne National Forest.
They feared it will march through Ohio as it has nearly everywhere else.

The Effect
In the April edition of the journal Science, researchers estimate that U.S farmers would see annual economic losses of $3.7 billion to $53 billion if the nation's bat population were wiped out. Losses to Ohio farmers would range from $740 million to $1.7 billion a year through a combination of crop damage and costs to purchase additional pesticides. The biggest losses, according to the study, would be felt in Darke, Putnam, Mercer, Wood and Pickaway counties, which have the most land in crop production. Losses in each county would range from $3million a year to more than $40million. The estimates are based largely on studies that examined the benefits of bats to Texas cotton growers.

Importance of Bats
Bats are prodigious insect eaters. Studies have shown that a single colony of 150 big brown bats can eat as many as 1.3 million insects a year. White-nose syndrome causes bats to burn through their fat reserves before winter ends, leaving them starving and with no insects to hunt for food. Paul Cryan, a U.S. Geological Survey research biologist and a co-author of the study, said the estimates should serve as a starting point for a discussion of bats' importance to people. In Ohio, bats eat pests that include cucumber beetles, stink bugs and leafhoppers, said Marne Titchenell, an Ohio State University Extension wildlife program specialist. By eating moths that develop from crop-damaging worms, bats break the reproductive cycle.