Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
Wiktionary
n. 1 The feeding relationships between species in a biotic community. 2 (context idiomatic English) a hierarchy
WordNet
n. (ecology) a community of organisms where each member is eaten in turn by another member
Wikipedia
Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Food Chain is a trade paperback collecting comic stories based on the Buffy the Vampire Slayer television series. 'Food Chain'' was the largest Buffy graphic novel to come out before the Buffy: Omnibus volumes.
A food chain is a linear network of links in a food web starting from producer organisms (such as grass or trees which use radiation from the sun to make their food) and ending at apex predator species (like grizzly bears or killer whales), detritivores (like earthworms or woodlice), or decomposer species (such as fungi or bacteria). A food chain also shows how the organisms are related with each other by the food they eat. Each level of a food chain represents a different trophic level. A food chain differs from a food web, because the complex network of different animals' feeding relations are aggregated and the chain only follows a direct, linear pathway of one animal at a time. A common metric used to quantify food web trophic structure is food chain length. In its simplest form, the length of a chain is the number of links between a trophic consumer and the base of the web and the mean chain length of an entire web is the arithmetic average of the lengths of all chains in a food web.
Food chains were first introduced by the African-Arab scientist and philosopher Al-Jahiz in the 9th century and later popularized in a book published in 1927 by Charles Elton, which also introduced the food web concept.
The food chain in ecology is a chain of trophic relations.
It can also refer to:
- Food Chain (Buffy comic), a comic based on Buffy the Vampire Slayer
- "Food Chain" (Adventure Time), an episode of an animated series
- The Food Chain, a Philippine-based charity
- The Food Chain, a 2014 play by Nicky Silver
- The Food Chain, a 1984 book by Michael Allaby ( André Deutsch, ISBN 0-233-97681-7)
- Food Chains, a 2014 film
- Food Chain (EP), the second extended play album by Sean Danielsen, singer of American rock band Smile Empty Soul
Food Chain is the fifth studio album by experimental post-hardcore band The Bunny the Bear, released through Victory Records on March 18, 2014. The album reached number 15 on the Billboard Top Heatseekers chart. It is the last album to feature founding clean vocalist Chris Hutka.
The album was announced in early 2014. The first single, "High Tides and Swimming Conditions" was released the following month with an accompanying lyric video. The album spawned three more singles, "First Met You," "Skyscrapers," and "The Seeds We Sow."
The track "Flying Like a Bird" was re-recorded from the band's 2010 debut album The Bunny The Bear. A deluxe version of the album was released as well, featuring four acoustic tracks from the band's Acoustic EP.
' Food Chain 'is the second solo extended play album from American recording artist Sean Danielsen, who is also the lead guitarist and lead vocalist of American hard rock ensemble Smile Empty Soul. Published on November 4, 2014, the album was produced by Eddie Wohl, and recorded at Babylon Studios in Van Nuys, California.
"Food Chain" is the seventh episode of the sixth season of the American animated television series Adventure Time. The episode was written, storyboarded, and directed by Japanese anime director Masaaki Yuasa. The episodes guest stars Regular Show storyboard artist Minty Lewis as Erin the caterpillar.
The series follows the adventures of Finn (voiced by Jeremy Shada), a human boy, and his best friend and adoptive brother Jake (voiced by John DiMaggio), a dog with magical powers to change shape and grow and shrink at will. In this episode, Finn and Jake learn about the food chain after being turned into its different parts—small birds, big birds, bacteria, plants, and finally caterpillars—by Magic Man (voiced by Tom Kenny). As Finn and Jake journey along the food chain, they meet another character named Erin, whom Finn falls in love with and attempts to marry. The episode concludes with all the main characters singing a song about how the food chain works.
The episode was the second (following David OReilly's fifth season installment " A Glitch is a Glitch") in the series to have been directed by someone not affiliated with the series. On the night that it aired, "Food Chain" was watched by a total of 1.97 million viewers. The episode received largely positive reviews from critics, and was nominated for both an Annie Award and an Annecy International Animated Film Festival Award.
Usage examples of "food chain".
He had not moved up the political food chain by throwing himself on too many grenades.
By creating a restaurant service that could cover thousands of rail miles, Harvey also created the nation's first large-scale food chain, which became a corporate model for White Castle and innumerable others.
If a person ate or drank one, it might end up in their body, but it might just go into the food chain and get recycled into the body of someone you liked.
I had expected them to be sterile bodies of water, from the absence of sunlight, precluding basic photosynthesis and the beginning of a food chain, and the high salt content of the fluid.
At the top of the food chain in the pits, a descendant, dark-adapted, of the terrors of the ancient seas, stood the long-bodied, nine-gilled salt shark.
His stomach, which had been talking for days now, directed him to the tiled oasis of a fast food chain, where he was careful to draw only the necessary notes from the bulge in his pocket.
Secretary of the Navy, who is at the top of your food chain and mine.
How many more steps in the food chain ladder are possible before something decides it likes the taste of human flesh?
I'd hate to find myself back here as something low down the food chain.
They come after the termites and the bigger reptiles and birds eat the little reptiles and so on, which is how the whole desert food chain begins.
The ground was probably saturated with it, relatively speaking, and even now, a thousand years later, it was still leaching by various slow-dispersal routes into the lake, where it worked its way up the food chain to maximum concentration in the bodies of fish, and the mouths of the people who ate them.
Since the types of fishing that prevailed put more pressure on the upper end of the food chain, the stocks of feeder fish recovered in the first year of the emergency.
Are these thresh deliberately taking themselves out of the food chain?