What trophic level is plankton?

What trophic level is plankton?

primary producers
Most of the life in our oceans relies on energy from the sun. The primary producers — the organisms at the first trophic level — include some of the microscopic aquatic organisms (plankton) shown here in coloured scanning electron micrographs.

What type of consumer is a plankton eating fish?

An example of a primary consumer in the ocean are tiny animals called zooplankton. Zooplankton are barely bigger than the phytoplankton they eat. While some are single-celled, most are multicellular and include shrimp, krill, and the larval forms of bigger animals like fish and jellyfish.

What is the trophic level of fish that eat zooplankton?

Trophic levels were initially defined to include only discrete steps (left of diagram). Organic detritus and microscopic plants (phytoplankton) occupy the first trophic level. Tiny zooplankton, which feed on phytoplankton, reside at the second level. Creatures that eat zooplankton sit at the third level, and so forth.

What is the trophic level for fish?

between 2.0 and 5.0
In the case of marine ecosystems, the trophic level of most fish and other marine consumers takes value between 2.0 and 5.0.

What is the phytoplankton trophic level?

Marine biologists would, for example, assign the anchovy (Engraulis encrasicolus) which supplements its main diet of phytoplankton with some zooplankton, to a trophic level of about 2.2; people fishing for anchovies (and eating a diet of only these small fish) would then be assigned a trophic level of 3.2 (right).

What determines the trophic level of a fish?

Trophic levels are determined by a species’ diet. Stable isotope analyses, trophic ecosystem models, and stomach material analysis can all be used to obtain it. A fish with a trophic level of 3.5, for example, will consume 50% herbivorous zooplankton (trophic level 2) and 50% zooplankton-eating fish (trophic level 3).

What is the second trophic level in a lake?

So, the second trophic level in a lake is Zooplanktons because they feed on primary producers. The more in-depth a study of food webs is done, the more complicated the relationships become. Diagrams of species relations become tangled tangles, requiring the structure to be conceptualized.

How is zooplankton modeled in ecological lake models?

When zooplankton is specifically considered, it is often modeled as a single state variable or as two state variables representing herbivorous and carnivorous zooplankton, or as omnivorous zooplankton. These groups, once again, have a wide range of organisms. Fish aren’t deliberately modeled in most ecological lake models.