What is the difference between consumers and omnivores

Students should now have a complete understanding of the complexity of the food web. At right is an example of a food web.

All living things need energy to stay alive. This energy comes from the sun. Plants make their food from energy from the sun.

Animals get their energy from the food they eat. Animals depend on other living things for food. Some animals eat plants while others eat other animals.

This passing of energy from the sun to plants to animals to other animals is called a food chain. Ask students to name all the different animals that are dependent on the one tree. First demonstrate a food chain, a simple interdependence , by linking the student with the sun card the source of all energy to the student with the grass card to the student with the zebra card to the student with the lion card. Balance is key!

Explain that the interactions in a grasslands system are more complicated than this. Have the participants now stand in a circle, out of order i.

Give the ball of string to the person with the sun. Then ask that person to pass the yarn to the person with a card of an organism that the sun supports. If the sun supports more than one organism in the circle, pass the string back to the sun and from the sun to the other organism that it supports.

Keep going through the chain until you get to the top consumers. The string will be a tangled web in the middle of the circle. Food chains are complicated, and the balance they create is essential. For example, the impact of overhunting will cause the lions to drop their strings.

What happens? This activity requires a large open area. In a class of 25 to 40 students, choose three to five to be predators and seven to ten to be plant-eaters. The remainder will be plants. This represents a balanced system where plants are more plentiful than plant-eaters, plant-eaters more plentiful than predators, and predators are the least plentiful.

The students can select which plant-eaters and predators will be in their groups. Each group selects hand-signals that will differentiate them from the other groups. Example: the plants may want to hold their hands out to their sides to represent leaves, the plant-eaters oryx may hold their hands on the heads to represent horns, and the predators lions may hold their hands up like paws with the claws showing.

The predators try to tag the plant-eaters who try to tag the plants. Since predators decompose when they die and become fertilizer, the plants try to tag the predators. Once you are tagged, you turn into whatever tagged you. After a period of time, stop the game to see how many plants, plant-eaters, and predators are left. Play should resume but should be stopped a few times before the end to determine what has happened and why. After playing a few rounds of the game, select one of the plants to re-enter the game as a human.

The rules for the human are different: the human can tag anyone, but no one can tag the human. Each time the human tags someone, that player becomes another human. See how long it takes before all players have become changed into humans. Discuss the changes and relationships that the game illustrates. Some questions for discussion might include:. Sign up for our Interactive Classroom - Coming Soon! Teaching Standards. Objectives Students will learn about food chains , pyramids, and food webs.

Background A food chain shows how each living thing gets its food. Humans are an example of a tertiary consumer. Herbivores are a type of consumer that feeds directly on green plants or algae in aquatic systems. Since herbivores take their food directly from the producer level, they are also called primary consumers. Carnivores feed on other animals and are secondary or even tertiary consumers. Next come the omnivores that eat a mixture of plants and herbivores.

Above us are carnivores, such as foxes, that eat just herbivores. Second-order Consumer — the organism that eats or derives nutrients from the first-order consumer. Grass Producer is eaten by the zebra 1st order Consumer who is eaten by the lion 2nd order Consumer. Related Tags: food chain.

Tertiary consumers in marine environments include larger fish such as tuna, barracuda and groupers, seals and sea lions, jellyfish, dolphins, moray eels, turtles, sharks and whales—some of which are apex predators, such as the great white or tiger sharks and orca whales.

These consumers are carnivores in the food chain. In the real world, a tertiary consumer can eat many different animals and even plants sometimes. This means that they can actually be carnivorous or omnivorous. Some examples of tertiary consumers include, birds of prey, big cats, and foxes. Toads eat grasshoppers. Therefore, they are one trophic level higher than grasshoppers.

They are considered secondary consumers. They are considered tertiary consumers. In most food chains, there are more than three links. This means that the secondary consumers get eaten too. The tertiary consumer is the next organism in the chain and feeds on the secondary consumer. The primary consumers are those that feed on producers, while secondary consumers eat primary consumers.

In grasslands, for example, grass acts as the producer, while mice that eat grass are the primary consumers. Predators of mice, such as snakes, are next up on the food chain as secondary consumers.

Some consumers feed on live animals but do not kill them. For example, small arachnids called ticks attach themselves to other animals and feed on their blood, but ticks are not considered predators. They are instead called parasites. Some secondary consumers eat both plants and animals. Ecosystems can also have tertiary consumers, carnivores that eat other carnivores. A bald eagle is an example of a tertiary consumer you might see near the coastal mangrove islands of the Everglades.

Its diet includes predatory fish that eat algae-eating fish, as well as snakes that feed on grass-eating marsh rabbits. When a top predator dies, it is consumed by scavengers or decomposers. In addition to consumers and the producers that support them, ecosystems have decomposers.

These organisms get their nourishment from dead organic material, such as decaying plant leaves or dead fish that sink to the bottom of a pond. Also called an autotroph. The audio, illustrations, photos, and videos are credited beneath the media asset, except for promotional images, which generally link to another page that contains the media credit. The Rights Holder for media is the person or group credited.

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A food chain outlines who eats whom. A food web is all of the food chains in an ecosystem. Each organism in an ecosystem occupies a specific trophic level or position in the food chain or web. Producers, who make their own food using photosynthesis or chemosynthesis, make up the bottom of the trophic pyramid.