Meadow feeding circuits: examples of compilation

Meadow is a land plot on which there is a perennial herbaceous vegetation that forms an appropriate cover. Usually meadows occur on highly fertile soils, and in order to form motley grass, a favorable water and temperature regime of the environment is needed. Meadow nutrition circuits have their own characteristics. The first link is usually composed of various - annual and perennial - plants, in abundance there grow. Among them are cereal, bean grasses, rosettes and creeping flowers, well-known flowers: bells, poppies, chamomiles, cornflowers, clover and many others.

Meadow feeding circuits

In the meadow, as in other places where animals live in abundance and plants grow, these food sequences are formed according to standard rules. Participants in the process are traditionally divided into producers and consumers. The former consume energy and nutrition for their functioning directly from materials that are not organic. Thus, most green plants are powered by the process of photosynthesis in the sun. And microorganisms living in the soil in a meadow (in one gram of fertile land up to a million or more) use gases and salts to produce energy. Such producers are, as a rule, the first link in the meadow feed chain. They are consumed by consumers of the first plan, who feed on plant food, receiving the necessary energy from it. Next are consumers of the second (third, fourth) level, which are carnivorous, that is, they feed on animal food. It closes the meadow feeding chains, as a rule, the strongest, fastest and largest predator that is found in this area. Such animals are usually not so many, and their populations are limited.

Chains of power in the meadow. Examples

Now we turn to the compilation of these sequences. Usually they can consist of several links (sometimes 5-6). To compose a feeding chain for a meadow, knowledge is required: who lives in a given locality, what food base is in an animal. We propose a chain:

A clover - a butterfly - a dragonfly - a frog - really - a hawk.

The first link in this composed sequence of 6 links is a plant that receives inorganic substances from soil and air and by means of sunlight and the process of photosynthesis converts them into vital energy. Butterfly, consumer of the first type, is fed by plant and nectar. A dragonfly eats a butterfly, a frog eats a dragonfly. She feeds on the frog. A bird of prey can eat the most horrible, but the fox can also act as the last link, for example.

In the pasture

There may also exist a shorter chain of 4 links, for example:

Wheat - field mouse - snake (viper) - predatory bird (kite or hawk).

Another food chain, characteristic of the meadow zones of the RF middle belt:

An annual herbaceous plant - an orthopteran insect grasshopper - a mammal shrew - a predatory bird buzzard.

And on the pasture, the meadow where cows and other animals graze, a food chain can be built even with the participation of people as one of the final links:

Vegetation, which feeds on the cow - a cow giving milk and meat - a person.