Meaning & use

food web

noun·Academic

A complex network of interconnected food chains showing the feeding relationships among many organisms in an ecosystem.

See it in a sentence

The biology textbook included a diagram of a forest food web linking dozens of species.

Overfishing one species can ripple through the entire ocean food web.

A note on using this word

A food web is more realistic than a single food chain because most organisms eat, and are eaten by, more than one species.

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