Born in food web ecology, the concept of trophic levels – the hierarchy of who eats who in the natural world – is an elegant way to understand how biomass and energy move through a natural system. It’s only natural that the idea found its way into the realm of aquaculture, where marine and freshwater farmers try to maximize their product with efficient inputs.
“It’s often used as a measure of how sustainable it is to harvest or consume that species,” said Rich Cottrell(link is external), a postdoctoral researcher at UC Santa Barbara’s National Center for Ecological Analysis & Synthesis (NCEAS).
As plants (level 1) become food to plant eaters (level 2), who in turn are consumed by carnivores (level 3) and so on, the amount of energy required to support the same weight of organisms increases, he explained. [Read more…] about A tangled food web: Maximizing production with efficient inputs
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