What does a tertiary consumer do?

• A. Eats producers.
• B. Eats primary consumers.
• C. Eats secondary consumers.
• D. Makes its own food.

Answer: (C)

Trophic levels and who eats whom define how energy moves through an ecosystem. A producer makes its own food, a primary consumer eats producers, a secondary consumer eats primary consumers, and a tertiary consumer eats secondary consumers. So a tertiary consumer is a predator that targets organisms that have already fed on others, placing it above the secondary level. That’s why describing it as one that eats secondary consumers best captures its role in the food web. For context, in a chain like grass → insect → frog → snake → hawk, the snake is a tertiary consumer because it eats the frog (a secondary consumer), and the hawk would be quaternary if it eats the snake.