A food web is a diagram illustrating the feeding relationships between the plants and animals in a certain area.
Basically who eats whom. They show the relationships between these organisms much more realistically than a food chain.
A true food web that considers all the plants and animals in a system is bound to be unwieldy and confusing. Food webs show how many animals, are interconnected by different paths.
Example:
ADVERTISEMENTS:
Trees produce acorns which act as food for many mice and insects. Because there are many mice, the weasels, snakes, and raccoons, have food. The insects in the acorns also attract birds, skunks, and opossums. With the skunks, opossums, weasels and mice around, hawks, foxes, and owls can find food. They are all connected.
One doesn’t find simple independent food chains in an ecosystem, but many interdependent and complex food chains that look more like a web and are therefore called food webs. A food web that shows the energy transformations in an ecosystem looks like as shown in this picture.
As you can see from this picture, food webs, with all their dependencies, can be very complex, but somehow nature balances things out so that food webs last a long time. Many species share the same habitat, their populations survive for many years, and they all live together.