why is it necessary to have carnivores in a forest?
Carnivores are animals that eat other animals. Their presence in the forest is essential for three reasons:
- They help in transferring energy from one trophic level to another in a food chain. i.e they transfer the energy stored in the animal they eat into themselves to the next level who consume them.
- They keep a controlled check over the population of the animals eaten by them. If they would not eat other animals then, the other animals may grow in large numbers and compete with them and others for food resources leading to scarcity of food resources in the ecosystem.
- Also, they reduce competition among species having likeness for the same food resource by eating one of the competing species.