Question: what happens when one part of the food chain malfunctions

Reka Nagy answered on 16 Nov 2016:

It can disrupt whole ecosystems! This is what is happening with pandas, for example – they eat bamboo. However, bamboo forests are being cut down to make way for soil to grow food in, so the pandas are slowly losing their habitats. If they are not able to get to their food, they will die – and if there was an animal that ate exclusively pandas, that one would die too, and so on, until the whole system was disrupted.

This is also why we can’t just wipe out all insects, no matter how icky we think they might be – because these insects spread plant seeds and pollen. If they stopped doing this, new plants would stop growing, animals that eat plants couldn’t survives, so animals that eat other animals would die too!