A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1187 entries
trophic
Trophic means relating to feeding and nutrition, and in ecology it organizes a community by who eats whom. Trophic levels run from plants, which make their own food, through herbivores, through the predators that eat them, and so on upward, with each level receiving roughly a tenth of the energy of the one below. That tenfold loss is why food chains are short and why large predators are rare.
Etymology
The word is Greek for nourishment. It appears across biology in compounds worth being able to read: An autotroph feeds itself, a heterotroph feeds on others, a saprotroph feeds on the dead, and a mycoheterotroph is a plant living off fungi.
Notes
Trophic cascade covers the consequence: A change at one level runs down through the ones below it, so removing or restoring a top predator alters the vegetation. Real food webs are far messier than the level scheme suggests, since most animals feed at more than one level and a great many eat both plants and animals, so a trophic level is best read as an average position rather than a slot.