Food chains are sometimes short because
a. Only a single species of herbivore feeds on each plant species.
b. Local extinction of a species causes extinction of the other species in its food chain.
c. Most of the energy in a trophic level is lost as energy passes to the next higher level.
d. Most producers are inedible.

Question

Food chains are sometimes short because

a. Only a single species of herbivore feeds on each plant species.

b. Local extinction of a species causes extinction of the other species in its food chain.

c. Most of the energy in a trophic level is lost as energy passes to the next higher level.

d. Most producers are inedible.

Accepted Answer

Hello everyone. And in today's video we have the following problem identify the incorrect statement regarding short food chains. And so keep in mind that we're looking for the incorrect same and um our answer choices. So the one that is false. So before we jump into a problem, let me quickly remind you or let us quickly visualize what a short foot chain is. And it is something very simple. It is a food chain That is made up of only 2-3 links or 2-3 traffic levels. In this case, the 100% of the energy is going to be in the producers. These energy is going to be transferred to the primary consumers in the form of 10%. And this energy is then going to be transferred to a secondary consumers in the form of 1%. And so this is how these energy is going to be transferred in these small short foot chain. So now that we know this, let us go over the answer choices. So we have the answer choice. A most of the energy in a traffic level is lost as energy passes to a higher energy level. As we see here, we can see that most of the energy is lost. As these consumers use this energy up in this metabolism and many other bodily functions. So when they are consumed, all of that energy loss is not going to pass on to the next traffic levels. So only only a part of the energy that they originally have will pass. And so we're going to cancel as ours. This is actually a correct statement. Then we have answer choice B Short food chains are the most stable since they involve the least transfer of energy because there is only 2 to 3 links, they are going to be the most stable food chains. These very long food chains that involved 5 to 6 links are going to be very unstable because of how much transfer of energy is taking place. So it's actually correct in the sense of answer choice C. We have that they consist of fewer links. These links are nothing more than traffic levels and as we already saw in our example here, we only contained to the three traffic levels. So it is actually correct as well. Then we have answer choice D. That is our only answer choice left. Only a single species of herbivores feed on each plant species. This is actually going to be incorrect because there is no rule that says that a single herbivores can only fit on a single plant species. This is not a characteristic of short food chain. So we're going to highlight it as being the incorrect statement and more answer choices. And so that's going to be the end of the video. I really hope this video helped you

Verified video answer for a similar problem:

Key Concepts

Trophic Levels

Energy Transfer Efficiency

Local Extinction