Q.Significance of food web is / are

A food web is the interlocking pattern formed when many individual food chains within the same ecosystem overlap with one another, and it is the basic structural unit that keeps an ecosystem stable in nature — a stability called homeostasis. Unlike a single linear food chain, a food web captures the real alternative-feeding-path flexibility of nature: in a grassland food web, for instance, if a rabbit is unavailable a mouse may switch to eating food grains instead, that mouse might then be eaten either directly by a hawk or indirectly via a snake, and the snake itself might be eaten directly by the hawk — so multiple redundant pathways exist for the same unit of energy to travel through the community. This redundancy is what lets an ecosystem's species remain balanced against one another through a kind of natural self-regulation, rather than depending on any single chain staying unbroken. Ecologically, food-web analysis is use …