What a Food Chain Shows
A food chain shows what eats what in one habitat. Each living thing in the chain is food for the next one, so the chain shows how food, and the energy stored in it, passes from one living thing to another. A short chain from a Singapore garden might be grass → grasshopper → spider → lizard. The grasshopper eats the grass, the spider catches the grasshopper and the lizard eats the spider.
The most important thing to remember is the direction of the arrow. It always points from the living thing that is eaten to the living thing that eats it. The easiest way to read it is to say “is eaten by” at every arrow: grass is eaten by the grasshopper, the grasshopper is eaten by the spider. Many children draw the arrow the other way, as if it meant “eats”, so the builder on this page checks the direction of every link and explains a reversed arrow in words.
Producers and Consumers
Every food chain begins with a producer. Producers are green plants and, in ponds and on the shore, algae. They make their own food from water and carbon dioxide, using light energy from the sun. Because of this, all the energy in a food chain first came from the sun. Animals cannot make their own food. They are consumers: they get their energy by eating plants or other animals.
Consumers can be sorted by what they eat:
| Kind of consumer | What it eats | Examples on this page |
|---|---|---|
| Herbivore | Only plants or algae | Grasshopper, caterpillar, fruit bat, mangrove crab, cow |
| Carnivore | Only other animals | Spider, frog, snake, heron, owl, crocodile |
| Omnivore | Both plants and animals | Sparrow, rat, long-tailed macaque, hornbill, small fish |
On this page an animal is called a herbivore, carnivore or omnivore according to what it eats in that habitat’s food web, which is how examination questions work too: always look at the arrows pointing into the animal before deciding.
Predators and Prey
An animal that hunts and eats other animals is a predator, and the animals it eats are its prey. In the field, the owl is a predator and the rat is its prey. Many animals are both at once: the frog is a predator of the grasshopper but prey for the snake. An animal that no other animal in the web eats, such as the eagle in the field or the crocodile in the mangrove, is sometimes called a top predator. Plants are eaten too, but we do not usually call them prey; we just say they are food for the herbivores.
From Food Chains to Food Webs
Real animals rarely eat only one thing. The sparrow eats grass seeds, caterpillars and grasshoppers, and the snake eats toads, lizards and sparrows. When several food chains from the same habitat are joined together, sharing the living things they have in common, the result is a food web. In the Join the chains box, children are given two or three food chains and draw them as one web: each living thing appears only once, and they add an arrow for every link in the chains. Arrows that are true in that habitat but not in the chains are accepted as well, and any arrow that is wrong, or points the wrong way, is pointed out. Explore the whole web shows every link in the habitat, and tapping a living thing shows what it eats, what eats it and what kind of consumer it is.
What Happens When One Living Thing Is Removed?
Upper primary questions often ask what would happen if one kind of animal disappeared, for example because of hunting, disease or pollution. Work it out in two steps along the arrows:
- Its food increases. If the frogs are removed, fewer grasshoppers and mantises are eaten, so their numbers go up.
- Its predators may decrease. If the frog was the only food of an animal, that animal has less food and its numbers go down. If the predator has other food, as the snake does, it may simply eat more of that instead.
The change can spread further. In the garden, if the ladybirds are removed, the aphids increase, and with more aphids feeding on them the hibiscus plants decrease. The web questions on this page only ask about changes that follow clearly from the arrows, and the explanation after each answer names the links that cause the change. Questions with a “may increase or decrease” answer are left out on purpose.
The Five Habitats
Each habitat has between 11 and 14 plants and animals that really live there together, drawn from Singapore’s gardens, ponds, rainforest, mangroves and open fields. The garden has hibiscus plants, aphids, ladybirds, toads and a garden snake. The pond has algae, tadpoles, mosquito larvae, dragonfly nymphs, small fish, snakehead fish, herons and kingfishers. The rainforest has fig trees and wild bananas feeding fruit bats, squirrels, mouse deer and macaques, with pythons and serpent eagles at the top. The mangrove has mangrove trees and algae on the mud, fiddler crabs, mudskippers, monitor lizards, otters and estuarine crocodiles. The field has grass and rice plants, rabbits, cows, rats, mantises and owls. The links are kept simple: the mudskippers here are the kind that hunt small crabs, and decomposers such as fungi and bacteria are not drawn, since primary food chain questions leave them out.
How to Use This Page
- Choose a habitat and your year. P4 builds chains of three living things, P5 chains of four, and P6 chains of four or five with questions on removing an animal.
- Build food chains. Drag a living thing into a box, or tap it and then tap a box. Tap a filled box to take the living thing out again. Press Check: every correct link turns green, and every wrong one is explained.
- Answer food web questions. The whole web of the habitat is shown above each question, so children practise reading arrows rather than guessing.
- Join the chains. In the food web box, drag from the living thing that is eaten to the one that eats it, or tap one and then the other. Tap an arrow to remove it.
- Print a worksheet for the chosen habitat and year: complete the chains, label producers and consumers, and answer questions on a printed food web, with an answer page.
Stars are given at the end of each round: three stars for every answer right first time. The best stars for each habitat and year appear on the habitat buttons, so children can see which habitats they have mastered.
Common Misconceptions
- “The arrow means eats.” It means “is eaten by” and shows the way the food goes. Ask your child to point to the arrowhead and say who gets the food.
- “The sun is part of the food chain.” The sun gives plants light energy, but it is not a living thing and is not eaten, so it is not drawn in the chain.
- “A bigger animal is always the predator.” Spiders eat insects larger than themselves, and a heron eats a fish that would be too big for a kingfisher. What matters is who eats whom.
- “If an animal is removed, everything else increases.” Only the things it eats tend to increase; its predators may go down, and plants can go down if there are more herbivores.
- “Omnivores eat everything.” An omnivore simply eats both plants and animals; the sparrow eats seeds and insects, not snakes.
Links to the Primary Science Syllabus
Food chains and food webs belong to the Interactions theme of the Singapore primary science syllabus, where pupils study how living things depend on one another and on their environment. The page covers the key words pupils are expected to use: producer, consumer, herbivore, carnivore, omnivore, predator, prey, food chain and food web, as well as how the population of one organism affects others. It also connects to the Energy theme, since a food chain shows how energy from the sun is passed from plants to animals.
Tips for Parents and Teachers
- Say the arrow out loud. Reading “is eaten by” at every arrow fixes the direction better than any rule.
- Start from the plant. When a chain is muddled, find the producer first, then ask “who eats this?” one step at a time.
- Use the explanations. After a wrong answer, have your child read the explanation aloud and point to the matching arrow in the web.
- Go outside. A school garden or a pond in a park has many of these living things. Look for chewed leaves, spiders’ webs and birds feeding, and build a chain from what you saw.
- Write full answers. For removal questions, train the two-part answer: what happens, and why, naming the link: “The grasshoppers will increase because the frogs that eat them have been removed.”
Nothing to Install, Nothing Uploaded
The food chain builder runs entirely in your browser on any phone, tablet or computer, with no account and no download. Your year, habitat and stars are kept only in your own browser; answers are never sent to us.
Frequently Asked Questions
The arrow points from the living thing that is eaten to the living thing that eats it. Read every arrow as "is eaten by": grass is eaten by the grasshopper, which is eaten by the frog. The arrow shows the direction in which food, and the energy in it, passes along the chain.
Plants, and algae in water, are producers: they make their own food from water and carbon dioxide using light energy from the sun. Animals cannot make their own food, so every chain of eating has to begin with a producer. All the energy in a food chain first came from the sun.
A food chain shows one line of feeding, such as grass, grasshopper, frog, snake. A food web joins several food chains from the same habitat, so it shows that most animals eat more than one kind of food and are eaten by more than one kind of animal.
The living things it used to eat usually increase in number, because fewer of them are being eaten. Animals that ate it may decrease, especially if it was their only food. The change can spread further along the web, for example more herbivores can mean fewer plants.