As you can see in the image above, my friend (Martin) is preparing to prey on his dinner for the night.
Often times, I find myself dwelling on the fact that there are now very few of my friends and family left. We are all severely endangered and as I can recall correctly, there are only about 250-750 of us left. Our food supply is abundant, which is pretty amazing, but the reason it is so plentiful is not as great. We live our daily lives in search for food such as flying lemurs, monkeys, and snakes which also roam around our tropical rain forests. Although the amount of life in these Philippine rainforests is profuse, if our keystone species were to be removed, our entire ecosystem would collapse and there would be merely nothing left. A keystone species is a species on which other species in an ecosystem largely depend, such that if it were removed the ecosystem would change drastically. In the tropical rain forests in the Philippines, the main keystone species is the Zam Tree, Agouti Jaguar, small rodents, Leaf Cutter Ant, lizards, tree frogs, beetles, tree snakes, or even us eagles. You may be wondering how humans, like yourself, are able to study us and learn about things like our niche since we are constantly in motion. I am here to tell you what I have observed about how humans interact with us. Many of my friends have been taken from their homes by human researchers and placed in research facilities. They don't live frantic lives, enclosed would be a better adjective. They are studied and often times bred. Facilities that have bred my species do it in as an attempt to save us or even use the offspring as research samples.
I eat flying lemurs, snakes, and monkeys-which makes me a tertiary consumer, while my prey eats spiders, mice, ad pineapple-making them a secondary consumer. What the primary consumers consume are some producers in my ecosystem: Grass and Roots. When I eat the monkey, I am a secondary consumer, and the monkey is a primary consumer.
This pyramid displays the trophic levels throughout my ecosystem. I am on top because I am the king, and nothing eats me.