🔗 What is a food chain?

A food chain shows who eats whom in nature. Energy from the sun moves from plants to plant eaters, and then to the hunters that eat them.

Producers, consumers and decomposers

• Producers are plants. They make their own food from sunlight, water and air. Grass, leaves, fruit, seeds and the tiny algae in the sea are all made by producers.
• Plant eaters (herbivores) such as rabbits, zebras, elephants and deer eat the producers.
• Hunters (carnivores) such as lions, cheetahs, owls and crocodiles eat other animals.
• Omnivores eat both plants and animals. Foxes eat mice and berries; bears eat fish, roots and honey; wild boars dig up roots and eat eggs.
• Decomposers like worms, fungi and bacteria break down dead plants and animals, so their goodness goes back into the soil for new plants.

Real food chains you can watch in Wild Valley

🌄 Meadow

🦁 Savanna

🐸 Wetlands

🌊 Sea

From chains to food webs

Most animals eat more than one kind of food, and are hunted by more than one kind of hunter. A fox eats rabbits, mice, eggs and berries. A rabbit can be caught by a fox, an owl, an eagle or a snake. When you draw all of these links together, the chains join into a big food web.

Why are there more plant eaters than hunters?

Animals use most of the energy in their food just to move, keep warm and grow. Only a small part (about a tenth) is passed on to the animal that eats them. So a meadow can feed many rabbits, but only a few foxes. In Wild Valley you can see this in the 📈 Population chart: when there are lots of plant eaters, hunters find food easily and raise more babies; when plant eaters become rare, hunters go hungry.

Eggs are food too

Many hunters, like foxes, raccoons, snakes, wild boars and even crabs, find nests and eat eggs. That is why many birds hide their nests, and why mother ducks and crocodiles guard theirs. In Wild Valley you can watch a fox sniff out a duck nest, or a crocodile mom chase a hungry visitor away.

Every animal matters

If one kind of animal disappears, the whole web changes. Without hunters, plant eaters can become so many that they eat all the plants. Without plant eaters, hunters starve. In Wild Valley animals can really die out, so you can see why keeping a balance is important, just like in real nature.

Try it yourself

1. Open the savanna and follow a cheetah. Watch how it sneaks up before it sprints, and how it runs away when a lion comes close.
2. Open the 📈 Population chart and watch the numbers of plant eaters and hunters change over a few days.
3. In the shop, bring a new hunter and see how the number of its prey changes.