marine food web

Syllable breakdown

Dictionary meaning

the complex network of feeding relationships among organisms in marine ecosystems, tracing the transfer of energy and nutrients from primary producers through successive trophic levels of consumers, decomposers, and recyclers; in open ocean systems the base of the food web is formed by microscopic phytoplankton that fix solar energy through photosynthesis, which are consumed by zooplankton including copepods and krill, which in turn support forage fish such as anchovies and herring, larger predatory fish, seabirds, and marine mammals; the marine food web differs from a simple food chain in capturing the reality that most organisms feed at multiple trophic levels and that energy flows through many parallel pathways, with disruption to any major component potentially cascading through the entire system