PHOTOS: Animals of the Arctic Food Web
Inside the Arctic Circle, only the toughest animals can survive, making the food web less complicated -- and more at risk. There are few alternatives if an animal loses its food source (see our Spring 2011 cover story "Arctic Fever"), so losing one link in the chain could have severe reverberations. Here are some of the animals that make up key parts of the chain, from the smallest to largest.
Copepods are an important food source for krill and Arctic cod. They rely on ice algae for their own sustenance.
Lauren F. Friedman is a freelance writer and multimedia journalist based in New York. Her work has appeared in Psychology Today, GOOD, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and other publications. As a Sulzberger Scholar at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalis... READ MORE >