Tag Archive for ‘cross-ecosystem subsidies’

How salmon get into trees

Everything in nature is connected. The sun’s power is captured and converted into food for plants. Herbivores eat these plants and are in turn eaten by predators. These predators die and decompose, turning back into nutrients for plants and continuing the cycle. As straightforward as this all sounds, it is, in a sense, the central tenet of ecological science – that everything is connected to everything else by the complex chains of interactions between species and their environment. Energy and matter flow through ecosystems by being continuously eaten, excreted, moved around and absorbed.