Sated pride at a rhino carcass

These lions have more or less finished their protracted meal in the sandy riverbed where the rhino died. How it died is uncertain, but its horn is no longer here; certainly not taken by the lions.

Lions are the apex predators in a food chain starting with primary producers, in this case plants that are eaten by herbivores. Various predators, big and small, live off the herbivores. Some serve as meals to bigger, stronger killers as well as omnivores in a progression to the most dominant carnivores at the top of the chain.

Who eats whom in a food chain is but a component of the complex food webs of nature, the ecological link patterns that include every species that eats something organic, i.e. mostly someone. These lions will certainly be eaten by some things, again big or small, in a few years, making the chains closed loops.

When decomposer species are added, all food chains fit into enormously intricate webs that all link to each other, the living world reduced to one integrated and continuous eating spree of all the living and their dead remains. Makes one feel at home?