Food Chain

food chain (or food web) the natural succession in which one organism eats another and is in turn eaten. The first term is more usual but the second is more accurate, given that these sequences involve all living creatures in the world and are massively interrelated.

The NSOED defines ‘food chain’ as ‘a series of organisms each dependent on the next for food, especially by direct predation’. It equates ‘food web’ with ‘food cycle’ and defines the latter term as ‘the system of interdependent food chains’.