All right, welcome. Well, this is going to be a lesson on producers and consumers. Now producers and consumers are talked about as the first part in understanding the interactions with the end ecosystems. They are the basis of those interactions because what we concern ourselves with or focus ourselves on is the energy flow throughout and giving an ecosystem. So that's where we're going to start with this lesson is producers and consumers. Since this topic really helps us set the foundation for understanding the relationships within an ecosystem, especially as it pertains to the energy flowing through an ecosystem, we should bring up the term trophic. The trophic refers to feeding or eating and that's what these relationships are all based on is this idea of feeding or eating might seem pretty brutal when you start thinking about it. There within an ecosystem there's a hierarchy of eating or feeding and we're referred to that as being trophic levels. And so as we talk about producers and consumers in this video, keep that in mind. We're going to try to relate that back to this idea of how all of them relate together in terms of the hierarchy of eating or feeding. So let's start with producers. Producers are organisms within an ecosystem that get their energy from sunlight. Well they don't get it right from sunlight. They obviously need a process to convert the sunlight into some chemical form of energy that processes called photosynthesis and creates a molecule called glucose which in turn gets broken down and then it gets released as energy for living things to use. Now producers because they can do that by themselves they produce their own energy so called producers. We can also call them auto tropes. Now, troph means the feed auto means self, so they're self-feeders able to do that by themselves. So those are the producers. Let's see some examples. So here's some pictures of some producers you can see they come in various sizes and shapes and forms, but they all have something common as they are taking in the sun in producing these molecules of glucose so that we can use them as energy ranges inside from these big large redwood trees all the way down to the phytoplankton and the algae's in that live in water. All the more important food sources for our food chains and food webs within our ecosystems and they all hold that same role of taking in sunlight and converting it into chemical energy. All right so those were the producers. Now we're going to move on to consumers. Consumers consume things which means that they are the organisms that need to get the energy from eating other organisms. They're not like the producers where the producers can provide themselves with the energy consumers have to go out and get something else. Just like in the producers we call them auto tropes here consumers because they eat something other than themselves they're called heterotrophs. heteromines other or opposite of themselves and tropic means to eat so we can call them heterotrophs as well as the tumors. There are four main types of consumers carnivores herbivores omnivores and decomposers sometimes we call them detritivores and there is a slight difference but we're going to classify them together as one type of consumer. So let's take a look at the different types of consumers and see what they're all about. We'll start with carnivores. Carnivores are consumers that eat other consumers. They're the ones that everyone remembers in an ecosystem because they're the ones that are most visible. They're out there eating other things that looks cool as other organisms hunt other organisms. It's something that we definitely relate to. You can see some of the examples of carnivores on your screen sharks, wolves, lions, hawks, those kind of organisms. Next we have the herbivores and herbivores are those consumers that eat the producers and they only eat the producers. As you can see in the screen what some of these herbivores might look like. You have insects that are eating just plants like the grasshopper. You have rabbits and squirrels and tortoises and koalabairs and zebras and elephants and horses and deer and there's a lot of herbivores. Some of the world's largest animals are actually herbivores. Omnivores are consumers that can do both what the carnivores and herbivores could do. They can consume other consumers and they can also eat the producers. Some examples of omnivores would be the raccoon, a lot of species of bears are omnivores eating fish and in other wildlife as well as berries and leaves. The red breasted Robin has pictured here and you can see a lot of those in Minnesota as well as us as humans we are omnivores. The last type of consumer is going to be decomposers and the tritivores. For our purposes in our class we are going to classify them all together as decomposers even though there are some slight differences between the meanings of those two words. They are going to be consumers that are going to specialize in eating living things that have died such as the mushrooms and other funguses, bacteria and all types of bacteria as well as organisms. Those are all specialized in breaking down living things that have died. That brings us to the end of this lesson. We did just a quick overview of what producers and consumers were and why they are the foundation of all these interactions within our ecosystems. .