Theoretical Application of Food Webs
A food webs is a type of graphical illustration that depicts a relationship between prey and predator in an ecological community. The relation is also called a food chain or food web. A food chain can also be explained as a connection or relationships within a community. In other word, the food chain is the relationships among species within a community. The graph illustrates the relationships among species, their mode of interactions and their method of interaction. The graph model reveals the relationship between the predators and prey within an ecological community. The graph also represents the ecological competition and status of the food webs.
Objective of this paper is to explore the case study of the food webs, its competition, bioxicity and trophic status. The paper also provides the application all the stipulated concepts of food webs.
Food Webs
This section discusses the factors that determine the ecological niche starting from the concept of competition to the notion of food web within an ecological community. The food webs is defined as the ecological community represented by graph with a vertex where a vertex is at each species within the community. For example, the edge starts from vertex of species A to the vertex of species if A species preys on B. species.
Fig 1: Graphical Illustration of Food Web
The fig 1 reveals the graphical illustration of the food web revealing 7 species that include...
The competition is defined using the concept of food web and two species competing with each other if they eat a common prey. In the fig 1, fox ad raccoon compete with one another because the rabbit is their common prey. While raccoon and milksnake compete, however, the robin and salamander do not compete because they do not compete for a common prey.
Fig 2: Ecological Niche
Factors that determine the health environment for a species are:
Moisture
Temperature, and pH
As being revealed in Fig 2, the acceptable values of each dimension is referred as an interval. Based on the illustration in the Fig 2, each species are represented as a box within the Euclidean space where the box represents each of its ecological niche based on the ecological principles.
The application of the food webs illustrates the energy flow from the primary producer to the primary consumers. In other words, the food webs reveal the productivity as well as the population abundance. The food webs also reveals how the man-made and natural environmental pressures has affected the ecosystems. (Hui, 2012).
Competition
HilleRisLambers, & Dieckmann, (2003) describe competition as a fundamental interaction of food webs within the ecological environment. For example, both omnivorous and predators predate and compete on their prey, and in an ecological environment, two…
