Food chain

Etymology

A term from 20th-century ecology, popularized by Charles Elton’s work on animal communities, using "chain" for the image of links passing energy from one organism to the next. The metaphor of "climbing the food chain" for social advancement followed from the biological sense.

noun phrase · /FOOD chayn/
A linear sequence showing who eats whom, from producers up to top predators.
What it names
The flow of energy through an ecosystem as a simple line — a useful teaching model that also serves as a metaphor for hierarchy.
Example
Remove the wolves from the top of the food chain and the deer population explodes, stripping the forest bare.
Related idea
A food chain is a single linear path of eating; a food web is the tangle of many overlapping chains that actually exists — the chain is the teaching simplification, the web the messier truth.