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Further up the food chain, the concentration of the contaminant increases, sometimes resulting in the top consumer dying. Biomagnification, also known as bioamplification or biological magnification, is the increase in concentration of a substance, e.g a pesticide, in the tissues of organisms at successively higher levels in a food chain. [1]
The rate of biomass production of an organism is required, which involves measuring growth and reproduction through time. There is still the difficulty of assigning the organisms to a specific trophic level. As well as the organisms in the food chains there is the problem of assigning the decomposers and detritivores to a particular level.
The observed values of connectance in empirical food webs appear to be constrained by the variability of the physical environment, [4] by habitat type, [5] which will reflect on an organism's diet breadth driven by optimal foraging behaviour. This ultimately links the structure of these ecological networks to the behaviour of individual organisms.
Bioaccumulation is the gradual accumulation of substances, such as pesticides or other chemicals, in an organism. [1] Bioaccumulation occurs when an organism absorbs a substance faster than it can be lost or eliminated by catabolism and excretion.
In biology, taxonomy (from Ancient Greek τάξις () 'arrangement' and -νομία () 'method') is the scientific study of naming, defining (circumscribing) and classifying groups of biological organisms based on shared characteristics.
A heterotroph (/ ˈ h ɛ t ər ə ˌ t r oʊ f,-ˌ t r ɒ f /; [1] [2] from Ancient Greek ἕτερος (héteros) 'other' and τροφή (trophḗ) 'nutrition') is an organism that cannot produce its own food, instead taking nutrition from other sources of organic carbon, mainly plant or animal matter. In the food chain, heterotrophs are ...
The result is high primary production by photosynthetic life such as phytoplankton and floating sargassum; zooplankton, free-floating creatures ranging from microscopic foraminiferans to small fish and shrimp, feed on the phytoplankton (and one another); both trophic levels in turn form the base of the food chain (or, more properly, web) that ...
What constitutes a genetically modified organism (GMO) is not clear and varies widely between countries, international bodies and other communities, has changed significantly over time, and was subject to numerous exceptions based on "convention", such as exclusion of mutation breeding from the EU definition. [48]