Food Chain Concept

The food chain concept describes how energy and matter pass in sequence from producers through successive levels of consumers within a community, and how few individuals can be supported at the highest of these levels, a pattern Charles Elton called the pyramid of numbers. Elton set the framework out in his 1927 textbook Animal Ecology, and it was extended into the interconnected food web and formalized as trophic dynamics fifteen years later by Raymond Lindeman.