Herbivores: Level 2 Of The Trophic Chain

Herbivores: Level 2 of the trophic chain consists of organisms that consume primary producers. Such species are often termed herbivores. Herbivores may be very small organisms such as zooplankton that graze on microscopic plants such as phytoplankton; however, herbivores also include many enormous mammals such as rhinoceri and elephants.
If significant numbers of the herbivore trophic level are removed, plant growth may exceed the balance found in the previous natural environment. For example the removal of herbaceous fishes by overfishing and the loss of the herbaceus sea urchin, Diameda antillarum, have caused an increase in the standing crop of algae on many coral reefs in the Caribbean Sea. Conversely, a sudden and large increase in the
Carnivores may vary greatly in size and feeding strategy, ragning from large and fierce animals such lions and sharks to small internal parasites.Carnivores may play important roles in the ecosystem by controlling the population sizes of herbivores who ultimately influence the biomass of plants in an ecosystem. For example, the loss of wolves in Yellowstone National Park in the United States allowed the elk population to increase so much that they greatly affected the growth of willows.
Decomposers:
Decomposers, also known as detrivores, are a special group of organisms that are capable of breaking down dead or dying tissue of other species. Unlike scavengers, who ingest dead biomass for internal digestion, the decomposers are capable of breaking down cells of other organisms using biochemical reactions that convert the prey tissue into metabolically useful chemical products, without need for internal digestion. The most common decomposers are fungi, bacteria and archaea, the latter two being micro-organisms. Thus, some decomposers can be considered Level 2 organisms, in the case that they consume dead plant material. However, some decomposers may occupy a higher trophic level, if they consume dead animals of a higher trophic
A food chain also shows how the organisms are related with each other by the food they eat. Each level of a food chain represents a different trophic level. A food chain differs from a food web, because the complex network of different animals' feeding relations are aggregated and the chain only follows a direct, linear pathway of one animal at a time. A common metric used to quantify food web trophic structure is food chain length. In its simplest form, the length of a chain is the number of links between a trophic consumer and the base of the web and the mean chain length of an entire web is the arithmetic average of the lengths of all chains in a food