🐍 What Is a Food Chain?
4th Grade 🧬 Life Science
A food chain shows who eats whom in nature, and how energy passes from the Sun to plants to animals.
Producers
A food chain starts with producers — plants and algae that make their own food from sunlight.
Consumers
Consumers eat other living things. A grasshopper eats grass, a frog eats the grasshopper, a snake eats the frog, and a hawk eats the snake. Animals that eat only plants are herbivores; animals that eat meat are carnivores; animals that eat both are omnivores.
Decomposers
When plants and animals die, decomposers like mushrooms, worms and bacteria break them down and return nutrients to the soil, helping new plants grow.
Food webs
In real nature, many food chains connect into a food web. If one animal disappears, the whole web can be affected.
Quick quiz
What is at the start of every food chain?
An animal that eats both plants and meat is a…
Which of these is a decomposer?