~37 min read
Encyclopedic overview
A freshwater aquatic food web. The blue arrows show a complete food chain (algae → daphnia → gizzard shad → largemouth bass → great blue heron)
A food web is the natural interconnection of food chains and a graphical representation of what-eats-what in an ecological community. Position in the food web, or trophic level, is used in ecology to broadly classify organisms as autotrophs or heterotrophs. This is a non-binary classification; some organisms (such as carnivorous plants) occupy the role of mixotrophs, or autotrophs that additionally obtain organic matter from non-atmospheric sources.
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “food web” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.