Imagine a community with the following 5 trophic levels: plants, crickets, mice, snakes, and hawks. Predict would happen if more hawks entered the community through immigration.
Since Hawks eat animals such as; rats, squirrels, rabbits, including mice, then the amount of mice varies in some of the population of hawks and vice versa. In this case, if the number of hawks increases then that means there’s more of them to come find preys like mice. As time goes by the population of mice will slowly decrease, because there’s too much of the hawks out there waiting to hunt them down.
As for snakes, they also like to prey on animals like mice and insects. So if the mice population dies out mainly because of the hawks, that wouldn’t exactly affect the snakes for they can always eat other things like insects. Some hawks, however, will eat snakes, but even so in my opinion the population of snakes will stay relatively the same throughout this period of time where there’s a sudden increase in hawks.
The population of crickets and plants, in my opinion, will also stay relatively the same only because the crickets aren’t exactly picky eaters and can feed off of plants no problem. The only difference is that the crickets can have a bit more freedom while eating plants due to the decrease in mice. That doesn’t mean they won’t be preyed upon anymore, it just means that there’s one less of an animal to hunt on crickets now. As for plants, the amount of them won’t change as much because the impact is more on the mice when the hawks come over.
That’s all for this essay. I hope you liked it. I’ll be posting more soon and have a great rest of your day!
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