Did you know that even meat-eaters, or carnivores, depend on plants for food? How? They eat plant-eating animals called herbivores. In turn, carnivores may themselves be eaten by bigger carnivores. And this process is called the food chain. Therefore, a food chain could comprise: Plant - Herbivore - First Carnivore - Second Carnivore = Food Chain But food chains are rarely as simple as this. Take the example of the food chain of: grass - hare - fox. A lot of animals eat grass besides hares, and several animals eat hares beside the fox. When several food chains get connected, they make a food web. How many food chains do you think you are a part of?

But before we get into the intricacies of food webs, let us begin with a single food chain and study it closely. Let us start with a small insect like the aphid which feeds on plant juices.

Choose a plant like a rose bush or a bean plant which has plenty of aphids feeding on it. Now pick off a leafy shoot which doesn't have any aphids on it. Put the shoot in a small bottle of water and plug the gap around the top of the bottle with cotton.

Stand the shoot in a bottle, in a large jar. Using a paint brush, carefully move one aphid from the bush on to the leafy shoot. Cover the top of the jar with cloth. Watch the aphid carefully, with a hand lens, to see how it uses its pointed mouthparts to suck the juices from the plant. Keep watching the aphid very closely, you will be able to see it giving birth to a baby aphid. Make a regular count to see how many of them are there in your jar.

After a day or two, put a Ladybird Beetle into the jar. Watch how it catches and eats the aphids. Draw a food chain for the same.

Aphids are plant pests and Ladybird Beetles eat these pests, hence the Ladybird is a good biological controller of the aphids. Rather than using insecticides, one should encourage such biological controllers. That way the food chain continues and nature is undisturbed.