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Rarely do organisms just eat one type of food. Carnivores eat other carnivores, as well as herbivores. Some may even eat both animals and plants and are called omnivores. If we listed every species that occurred in an ecosystem and then drew arrows connecting them to each of their food sources, we would see so many crisscrossing arrows that it would give the appearance of a spider web. Therefore, we call the entire complex array of feeding relationships in an ecosystem a food web. Food webs more accurately describe the feeding relationships that exist in an ecosystem than do simple food chains. However, when depicting food webs, the arrows do not show the energy that is being lost at each trophic level.
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