Producers are highlighted in green, Primary Consumers in yellow, and Secondary Consumers in red.
This is an example of an arctic tundra food web. The organisms on the very bottom are the producers who convert sunlight into usable energy through photosynthesis. Producers in the arctic are mostly small shrubs and lichen, like arctic willow, caribou moss, and Labrador tea. The permafrost ground makes deep root systems hard so the plants evolved to be smaller to make shallower root systems. The primary consumers, which mainly contains herbivores, eat the producers and gain 10% of their energy. They include caribou, musk ox, arctic hares, ermines, lemmings, and harlequin ducks. At the top of the food chain are the secondary consumers who consume the primary consumers. They are arctic wolves, snowy owls, and arctic foxes. Terrestrial food webs are not the only types of food webs in the arctic. There are also marine food webs.
Polar bears are one of the top predators in the arctic, but their diets mainly consist of marine life. Polar bears are both tertiary consumers, meaning they eat secondary consumers, and quaternary consumers who eat tertiary consumers. Ringed seals, or rather seals in general, are the main course of a polar bear's diet, however they do also consume secondary consumers, large fish like trout, cod, and salmon. This food web's producers are arctic moss and arctic algae which are eaten by the primary consumers arctic grasshopper, arctic shrimp, and arctic krill. Polar bears can get either 0.1% or 0.01% of the energy offered by the producers at the trophic level. This is also a reason for there being the most organisms being producers and the least amount of organisms as tertiary consumers in most biomes and food pyramids.