Food Chain Quiz
Questions: 16 · 10 minutes
1. Consider the chain algae → zooplankton → small fish → seal. What is the small fish?
A secondary consumer
A producer
A primary consumer
A decomposer
2. Suppose most decomposers vanished from a forest ecosystem. Which long-term effect would be most likely?
Dead material would disappear faster, and soil nutrients would increase immediately
Dead material would accumulate, and nutrient recycling would slow
Energy would cycle back to the Sun instead of moving through organisms
Consumers would begin producing food directly from sunlight
3. In a marsh, snails and insects eat plants, while fish eat both snails and insects. Why is this better represented as a food web than as one food chain?
Food webs show multiple interconnected feeding pathways
Food chains can contain only aquatic organisms
Food webs show energy returning from predators to prey
Food webs exclude producers from feeding relationships
4. What is the original energy source for most food chains on Earth?
Minerals absorbed from soil
Heat released by consumers
Sunlight
Carbon dioxide released by decomposers
5. Which sequence correctly shows energy moving through a simple grassland food chain?
Fox → rabbit → grass
Grass → rabbit → fox
Rabbit → grass → fox
Grass → fox → rabbit
6. In a food chain diagram, what does an arrow from a caterpillar to a bird usually mean?
The bird provides energy directly to the caterpillar
The caterpillar hunts or controls the bird
Energy and matter pass from the caterpillar to the bird when it is eaten
Both organisms occupy the same trophic level
7. An owl eats seed-eating mice and also eats snakes that prey on those mice. What does this show about the owl's trophic level?
It is always a primary consumer because the chain begins with seeds
It is a producer when it eats mice and a decomposer when it eats snakes
Its trophic level can differ depending on the feeding pathway being considered
It has no trophic level because it eats more than one kind of animal
8. In a simplified model, producers store 10,000 energy units and about 10% passes to the next trophic level. Approximately how many units reach the herbivores?
100
9,000
1,000
10,000
9. A persistent pollutant enters a lake in tiny concentrations and becomes more concentrated at successive trophic levels. Which organism would generally accumulate the highest concentration?
Microscopic algae at the base of the web
Zooplankton that eat the algae
Aquatic plants that absorb sunlight
A long-lived fish-eating bird at the top of the web
10. A forest supports many insects but only a small number of insect-eating hawks. What best explains this pattern?
Hawks cannot obtain energy from animal tissue
All insects transfer exactly the same amount of energy to hawks
Producers receive less energy than top predators
Energy is lost at each trophic transfer, leaving less available at higher levels
11. In the chain grass → grasshopper → frog → hawk, which organism is the primary consumer?
Hawk
Frog
Grass
Grasshopper
12. Which organism is most accurately classified as a decomposer?
A fungus chemically breaking down dead wood
An earthworm consuming leaf fragments
A vulture feeding on a carcass
A beetle chewing pieces from a dead plant
13. Which description best defines a producer in a food chain?
An organism that makes organic food using light or chemical energy
An organism that obtains energy by eating producers only
An organism that breaks dead material into simpler substances
An organism that hunts other consumers for energy
14. Hawks are removed from an ecosystem where they regularly prey on rabbits. If other conditions initially remain similar, what is the most likely short-term change?
The rabbit population immediately disappears
The rabbit population increases because predation declines
Plants increase because more rabbits feed on them
Hawks become primary consumers
15. Which comparison between a detritivore and a decomposer is most accurate?
A fungus hunts living prey, while an earthworm produces its own food
An earthworm ingests dead fragments, while a fungus breaks dead material down externally with enzymes
An earthworm is always a producer, while a fungus is always a primary consumer
Both terms apply only to animals that eat living plants
16. A bird eats berries and also eats caterpillars that feed on leaves. How can the bird function in this food web?
Only as a producer
Only as a decomposer
Only as a primary consumer
As a primary consumer when eating berries and a secondary consumer when eating caterpillars