Producers and Consumers

Producers produce their own food. They do this by using light energy from the sun, carbon dioxide, from the air and water from the soil to produce food - in the form of glucose or sugar. As we all learned from our previous lesson, this process is called photosynthesis. 

Within an ecological food chain, there are three categories of consumers: primary consumers, secondary consumers, and tertiary consumers. Primary consumers are usually herbivores, which means their foods are mainly plants and fungus. Secondary consumers, however, are carnivores, feeding on other animals.

Here at my site, three types of producers are the papaya trees, banana trees, and the birds that inhabit there.

The first producer I will be talking about is the papaya tree. One species the papaya trees feed are of course, insects; insects love sweet things. Making the insects that eat the papaya, primary consumers. A secondary consumer to the papaya, is actually one of the producers itself, the Marianas fruit dove. 

 The Marianas fruit dove not only feeds on the papaya tree, but on the other producer too, the banana trees. This dove feeds on the primary consumers, too, the insects. Get the picture? It sort of becomes like a food chain. 

While the banana and papaya trees act as the producers of this "food chain," the insects are the primary consumers, since the insects eat off of the trees, and the Marianas fruit dove acts as the secondary consumer, resulting in the bird actually eating the insects as well.