Wednesday, April 28, 2010

Secondary Consumers





The secondary consumers are third in the food chain, eating and getting energy from the primary consumers, who in turn got energy from producers. These secondary consumers consist mostly of carnivores, animals who only eat meat. Sometimes these were also scavengers but those are in another paragraph. Some secondary consumers in the rain forest are: frogs, toads, woodpeckers, leopards, and parrots etc. Tertiary consumers are here too. They eat other secondary consumers.







Primary Consumers


The next living organisms in the food chain are the primary consumers. These herbivores eat the producers. The primary consumers are animals such as monkeys, grasshopppers, beetles, slugs, and squirrels. They eat the plants such as bananas, but in some cases, the primary consumers are eaten buy the producers. Take the Venus flytrap for example. These plants eat unsuspecting vistors who are there for the nectar.

Monday, April 26, 2010

Producers in the Forest



Producers are the very beginning of the food chain. They get energy from the sun and use it to grow. Producers are all the plants on the planet. In the rain forest, some examples would be lots and lots of trees, tons of different kinds of creepers, flowers, and undergrowth. Because of the rainforest's varying habitat, it has baffling amounts of different varieties of plants. These plants have developed many adaptations that help them live. Some leaves are pointed while others have grooves. Some even have an oily coating to keep off the water and almost all leaves are big and wide to absorb as much sunlight as possible. All this only helps all those primary consumers to get a nice meal!

Intro to Food Chains

For those of you who are too dense to know what a food chain or a food web is, this blog is here to explain it to you. A food chain is basically a chain of plants, animals, and decomposers that eat each other. It is a constant cycle of the transfer of energy from one living organism to the next. A food web is basically a bunch of food chains connected to one another so that there is more than one thing that can eat something. In this blog we will be talking about the food chains and food webs of the tropical rain forest.