Why are food chains so short?

Energy is lost moving up in a food chain, and this limits the length of the chain - so it's more efficient to feed people with plants than with meat. Organisms usually compete with each other for ... Most food chains are quite short, and they rarely consist of more than four steps. This is because a lot of energy is lost at each step. read more

Food chains are short for several reasons: 1. every level of biological pyramid transfers about 10% of the lifetime consumption of energy to the next level, because organisms have to live. read more

A secondary consumer then has less to feed on, so they are even more scarce, and may be the end of the food chain. Limited availability of food energy, which drops drastically at each trophic level, leads to a short food chain. read more