A localized region of sediment loss will develop, and the beach will recede. Food chains in upwelling regions tend to be short and efficient. High primary productivity means that food is readily available, so consumers can find it with less effort. By contrast, see Fig 14.4, the food chain is relatively long, each step has a greater loss of energy, and the overall loss from primary production to fish biomass is much larger. Explain the inverse relationship between an organism's size and its relative abundance as shown in table 14.3, p391.
Large organisms tend to require a lot of energy and correspondingly large consumption.
If they are also on a higher trophic level, then there is even more energy loss to maintain the organism. Therefore, it's impossible for large organisms to be as abundant as the smaller organisms that consume less. The rate of primary production in the open ocean is less than that the rate of primary production along coasts, but the total primary production of the open ocean exceeds that of the coasts. This is not a contradition. The rate of primary production in the open ocean is lower than coastal zones, but the volume of the oceans where primary production occurs is much larger than that along the coasts.