Food Chains Word Search
This food chains puzzle starts with the sun and climbs one link at a time: the producer, the herbivore and carnivore, the scavenger and decomposer, and each trophic level, with real links like clover, rabbit and hawk.
Charles Elton, an English zoologist, described food chains and the pyramid of numbers in his 1927 book Animal Ecology, after studying the animals of Bear Island in the Arctic. In 1942 Raymond Lindeman measured the energy moving through a small Minnesota lake and found most of it lost at every step, used for living or given off as heat. That is the root of the ten percent rule, and it is why chains rarely run more than four or five links.
Some chains are surprisingly short. In the ocean, tiny plankton feed krill and krill feed whales, so the largest animal on earth eats near the bottom of the chain. In the Pacific Northwest, salmon carry food from the sea up into rivers; bears, eagles and other scavengers drag the carcasses into the woods, and nitrogen from the ocean ends up in the trees.
Free Food Chains Word Search Online Game
Play the Food Chains word search in your browser, on your own or head to head against a friend in real time. Nothing to install and no account needed – send someone the link and you are both looking at the same grid.
Food Chains Word Search Printable Puzzles
Three sheets to choose from, free to print or download as a PDF. Pick a difficulty below, or open the printable Food Chains word search page to see all three together, generate a fresh grid, and check the full word list.
Hard
15x15 grid, up to 23 hidden words
Print or Download pdfMedium
12x12 grid, up to 15 hidden words
Print or Download pdfEasy
10x10 grid, 5 words across and down
Print or Download pdf
Puzzle Vocabulary Words
Below you can see all possible words that the topic Food Chains has.
Depends on difficulty level you select in the game amount of words hidden in the puzzle will be different.
In Easy game you have to find up to 5 words, medium game can have up to 15 words and hard puzzle can have up to 23 words.
Every time you start a new game - our word search generator will pick random words to build the puzzle.
- Acorn
- Algae
- Apex
- Autotroph
- Bear
- Carnivore
- Clover
- Consumer
- Decomposer
- Detritivore
- Energy
- Food Web
- Fox
- Frog
- Grasshopper
- Hawk
- Herbivore
- Heterotroph
- Krill
- Mouse
- Omnivore
- Orca
- Owl
- Plankton
- Predator
- Prey
- Primary
- Producer
- Rabbit
- Salmon
- Scavenger
- Seal
- Secondary
- Snake
- Squirrel
- Sun
- Tertiary
- Trophic Level
- Vulture
- Worm