In an ecosystem, there are many different types of organisms on the food web. The variety of animals and plants, or in other words, biodiversity, in a food web is crucial to its survival and stability, with every single organism contributing in some way. If one of the populations of an organism changes, it may affect the entire food web. Ocean sunfish live in tropical waters, posing as both a resource population and consumer population. This organism is eaten by sea lions and killer whales, and consumes jellyfish for ESMs (energy storage molecules). The ocean sunfish is only one of many other organisms that also relies on jellyfish to get energy, for example, sea turtles and hermit crabs. This means that all three of these organisms are competing for the same food source, so…show more content… If the population of ocean sunfish increased then there would be more energy for sea lions and killer whales to obtain, allowing for more reproduction, which would cause an increase in the population. On the other hand, the jellyfish population would decrease since more energy storage molecules would be needed from the population, causing more deaths than births. These are all examples of direct effects since all of them directly affect one another. Even though sea turtles and hermit crabs are necessarily connected to sea turtles and hermit crabs, they would still be affected. If the ocean sunfish population increased, there would be much more jellyfish eaten by that one specific group of organisms, and less for the other two populations. This would reduce reproduction rates in those populations since they don’t have enough energy to reproduce. This would cause a decrease in both of these populations, since there would be less births than deaths. The zooplankton population would also increase since there would be less jellyfish that would consume them, which would cause more births than
