--- title: Food chains: sun, plants, plant-eaters, meat-eaters — a lesson of Mova's school · trees and pragmatics description: «Food chains: sun, plants, plant-eaters, meat-eaters», a lesson of the biology course of Mova's primary school, sentence by sentence with dependency trees and pragmatics. It begins: Almost every meal on Earth starts with sunlight: green plants and algae catch the Sun's energy and build food from wat --- [Mova](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/46-food-chains/) [home](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) / [corpora](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/) / [school](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/) / [Biology](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/) / Food chains: sun, plants, plant-eaters… # Food chains: sun, plants, plant-eaters, meat-eaters Lesson 46 of the biology course of Mova's primary school: 14 sentences, each with its syntax tree and pragmatics. The lessons are written for Mova, and their agreed trees are part of Mova corpus 0.4 (CC BY-SA 4.0). How Mova does on its tests: [the lesson at school](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/school-run/biology/46-food-chains/). - [0](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/46-food-chains/0/) — Almost every meal on Earth starts with sunlight: green plants and algae catch the Sun's energy and build food from water and carbon dioxide, and every animal lives by eating plants or eating something that ate plants. - [1](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/46-food-chains/1/) — A food chain shows who eats whom: grass, then rabbit, then fox, with arrows pointing from the food to the eater, the way the energy goes. - [2](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/46-food-chains/2/) — Look at your cheese sandwich: the bread was wheat that grew in sunshine, the cheese came from milk from a cow that ate grass, so you are at the end of food chains too. - [3](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/46-food-chains/3/) — At each step most of the energy is used up for moving, breathing and keeping warm, so there are always far more zebras than lions, and a cartoon savanna with as many lions as zebras could never last a single season. - [4](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/46-food-chains/4/) — Plants make their own food from sunlight, water and carbon dioxide; this is photosynthesis, it uses the green chlorophyll in leaves and gives out oxygen; plants do not eat soil, which only gives them water and minerals. - [5](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/46-food-chains/5/) — In a food chain such as grass, rabbit, fox, the grass is the producer, the rabbit a plant-eater or herbivore, and the fox a meat-eater or carnivore; arrows point from food to eater. - [6](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/46-food-chains/6/) — At each step only about a tenth of the energy passes on to the next eater, so there are far more plants than plant-eaters and far more plant-eaters than meat-eaters, and chains are usually only 3 to 5 steps long. - [7](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/46-food-chains/7/) — A pond food chain can be tiny green algae, water fleas, sticklebacks, then a heron or a pike; a jar of pond water can hold thousands of living things. - [9](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/46-food-chains/9/) — Tiny drifting algae and bacteria called phytoplankton are the producers of the ocean, and they make roughly half of the oxygen produced on Earth. - [10](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/46-food-chains/10/) — Blue tits time their chicks to hatch when caterpillars are most common, and one family can eat thousands of caterpillars, often quoted as about 10,000. - [11](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/46-food-chains/11/) — A real fox eats rabbits, mice, birds, worms, beetles, fruit and leftovers, so food chains join into a tangled food web, which lets animals switch food when one runs short. - [12](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/46-food-chains/12/) — Wolves were brought back to Yellowstone in 1995; elk numbers fell and in some places young willows and aspens grew back, though scientists still argue how big the wolves' effect really was. - [14](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/46-food-chains/14/) — Near hot springs on the deep sea floor, found in 1977, food chains start with bacteria that make food from chemicals instead of sunlight; giant tube worms have no mouth and live on such bacteria inside them. - [15](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/46-food-chains/15/) — People are omnivores, eating plants and animals, and growing plants for people uses much less land than feeding plants to animals and eating the animals. - ← previous: [More record-breakers and oddballs: sloth, narwhal, chameleon, electric eel, giraffe](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/45-sloth-narwhal-chameleon-eel-giraffe/) - next →: [Who eats whom: predators, prey, scavengers and decomposers](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/47-predators-prey-scavengers-decomposers/) - ↑ back to [Biology](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/)