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Food Chain

"Food Chain" is a descriptor in the National Library of Medicine's controlled vocabulary thesaurus, MeSH (Medical Subject Headings). Descriptors are arranged in a hierarchical structure, which enables searching at various levels of specificity.

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The sequence of transfers of matter and energy from organism to organism in the form of FOOD. Food chains intertwine locally into a food web because most organisms consume more than one type of animal or plant. PLANTS, which convert SOLAR ENERGY to food by PHOTOSYNTHESIS, are the primary food source. In a predator chain, a plant-eating animal is eaten by a larger animal. In a parasite chain, a smaller organism consumes part of a larger host and may itself be parasitized by smaller organisms. In a saprophytic chain, microorganisms live on dead organic matter.


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This graph shows the total number of publications written about "Food Chain" by people in this website by year, and whether "Food Chain" was a major or minor topic of these publications.
Bar chart showing 57 publications over 14 distinct years, with a maximum of 8 publications in 2009 and 2015
To see the data from this visualization as text, click here.