Notes: 1  When s is a string or Unicode string object the in and not in operations act like a substring test. In Python versions before 2.3, x had to be a string of length 1. 2  Values of n less than 0 are treated as 0 (which yields an empty sequence of the same type as s).
A food web describes the flow of energy and nutrients through an ecosystem, while a food chain is a linear path through a food web. Distinguish between food chains and food webs as models of energy flow in ecosystems. Organisms can be organized into trophic levels: primary producer, primary consumer, secondary consumer, and tertiary or higher-order consumer.
In ecology, energy flow, also called the calorific flow, refers to the flow of energy through a food chain. In an ecosystem, ecologists seek to quantify the relative importance of different component species and feeding relationships. A general energy flow scenario follows: