Life – can be defined as combination of seven main actions known as the characteristics of life that set living

things apart from non-living things.

Sensitivity – sense organs detect changes in an organism’s surroundings
Nutrition – food is either consumed or made. Animals, fungi, and many single-celled organisms take food into
their body from their surroundings.
Proboscis – aphids pass food through a digestive system from which nutrients move into the body’s cells.

Movement – plants are rooted in the ground, but can still move their parts in response to their surroundings,
for instance, to move towards a light source.
Food chains – living things rely on one another for nourishment. Energy in a food-chain travels from the sun to
plants, then animals, and finally to predators at the very top of the chain.
Ocean food chain – near the surface of the ocean, where the bright sunlight strikes the water, billions of
microscopic algae photosynthesize to make food.
Heat production – the chemical reactors that take place in living organisms generate heat, which escapes into
the surrounding water.
Ecological pyramids – the levels of a food chain can be shown stacked up together to make an ecological
pyramid.
Great white shark – being the food chain’s top predator means that little else will prey on an adult great white
shark.
Sealion – sealions swim hundreds of metres from the shoreline to reach the nest fishing grounds, as they hunt
herring, the energy in the fish meat passes into the sealion’s body.
Sunlight – when the sun is shining brightly, a single square metre of ocean surface collects more than a
thousand joules of energy every second, enough to power a microwave oven.
Phytoplankton – plankton are tiny organisms that float in the water in their billions. They contain algae called
by phytoplankton that make food by photosynthesis.
Zooplankton – tiny animals, called zooplankton, feed on the phytoplankton, including a variety of shrimps and
fish larvae, these are the primary consumers, animals that only eat only algae or plants. They make up the
second stage of a food chain.
Herring – the pacific herring is a key link in the ocean food chain. An omnivore that eats both phytoplankton
and zooplankton, it is the secondary consumer of the chain, and swims in large shoals that are easily snapped
up by bigger predators.
Parasites – a parasite, it steals food from the vine because it cannot photosynthesize for itself. Surprisingly, the
world’s biggest flower by a plant with no leaves.
Hotbed of nutrition -