Since animals are higher on the trophic level, they are less efficient sources of food energy.
For example, all birds have beaks and skeletons, which despite having mass are not eaten by the next trophic level.
There is also pyramid of numbers which represent the number of organisms in each trophic level.
The biodiversity of the phytoplankton is poor and its biomass is low, thus the lake's trophic level ranges from oligotrophic to mesotrophic.
The article establishes the importance of the mean trophic level of fisheries as a tool for measuring the health of ocean ecosystems.
However, determining the trophic level of some plankton is not straightforward.
Because of its trophic level position, the golden topminow also has a wide array of predators that feed on smaller, surface feeding vertebrates.
The aim of the present study is to quantify levels of diversification of an endemic snail fauna that represents one of the major components of the metazoan consumer trophic level.
