That's why the concept of food chain is phased out in favor of food webs which can more accurately model relationships.
this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2023
34 points (92.5% liked)
No Stupid Questions
35921 readers
1909 users here now
No such thing. Ask away!
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.
Credits
Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!
The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
Doesn't have the same ring to it. I guess it will take time for "food webs" to get in our language, if ever.
For most spiders every web is a food web.
There's a pithy saying about science that goes, "All models are wrong, but some models are useful."
"The food chain" isn't a real thing, it's just a conceptual model that humans use to organize and analyze information about the natural world. In actual, messy reality, all sorts of organisms eat other organisms all willy-nilly. We model that as "the food web", because these phagic connections are all interlinked. I mean, mosquitoes which bite humans also get eaten by other creatures, which die and get eaten by detritovores, which build soil, and the nutrients absorbed by plants, which humans eat. Polar bears die and their bodies recycled the same way. That makes a web of connections.
As a conceptual model, "the food chain" is just a linear series of links in the food web. Picking out the start and the end is entirely arbitrary. Doing so can be useful in some scenarios, such as tracing PFAs up the food chain from polluted water to plankton, to small fish, to big fish, to bears and eagles and humans. In other cases, it's not quite as useful, such as putting polar bears at the top of the food chain. I guess it's useful, though, if it reminds you that polar bears are dangerous. But they mostly hunt seals, and only incidentally kill people, but people also hunt seals, and sometimes incidentally kill polar bears; the model gets complicated quickly.
Anyway, yes, humans can be below mosquitoes and polar bears on the food chain, if that's how you decide to lay out a particular food chain.
There’s a pithy saying about science that goes, “All models are wrong, but some models are useful.”
It reminds me of something a sociology professor said about economic and sociological theories being lenses that focus on particular aspects of the world--they can't see everything, but often they can narrow in on certain parts to aid our understanding.
They are after humans in the food web.
The food web is directed but not acyclic, meaning that arrows can point in a loop.
An example of a directed, acyclic “web” (technically a graph), would he books being published that quote other, previously published books.
Another is (ideally) the library dependencies of a codebase. If you end up with a loop in your dependency graph your package manager will probably fail.
An example of a non-directed graph is the covid contact data that our phones were collecting if we opted in during the pandemic. If I was close to you, you were close to me. It basically means if we drew you and I as dots on paper, it would be a line connecting us not an arrow.
The food web is directed (there is the eater and the eaten) but not acyclic. I can eat a bear, and the bear can eat me, which would be represented not as one line, but as two arrows pointing to and fro.
Great explanation of the concept of a food web. Grew up only knowing the food chain as well. Still kind of fuzzy on the rules for direction with certain animal pairs and whether it's based on predation capability or something else.
After I saw the video of the horse eating the chick I just gave up on trying to understand it
Yep saw that one and another with a deer eating a bird. So I think there's new categories for animals now too on what they eat. Instead of carnivores, omnivores, and herbivores. There's obligate carnivores and opportunistic carnivores. Apparently even pandas would kill for some protein if given the opportunity.
Gonna be a 3-D food web once we get all the new science rules settled.
Has there been two papers that quote each other?
Mosquitoes don't "eat" the blood they suck. They use it for their eggs.
No.
Polar bears are one of the few mammals in which "most" of them see humans purely as food. While many other large carnivores are often more careful around adult humans and don't often go for them directly, unless very hungry, desperate or with offspring.
But it is not strict rule.
On top of that, mosquitos don't eat mammals in the way you'd think of a "food chain", as they're not trying kill their target, just take a small part. The deadly diseases are for them an unintended and actually unwanted side-effect, they want us alive so we'll make more blood for them to reproduce.
Are parasites treated like predators in fond chains?
Mosquitoes, no. Polarbears, absolutely. If it's brown, lie down, if it's black, fight back, but if it's white, fuck you your death was premeditated and the bear has every intention to kill you no matter what.