A biological network is a group of living entities or components that are linked in some way to form a more cohesive

whole. And if that explanation sounds a little vague and broad, there's a good reason for that.

Biological networks are expansive and found in many shapes and sizes, and they're not always

obvious in terms of being able to perceive them or even define or

categorize them, even when they are ever present and super valuable. A food web, for instance,

is probably one of the more well-known biological networks we can point to and say, okay,

yeah, I get that, sunlight, or sometimes other types of environmentally available energy is converted into food

for algae and plants.

And those algae and plants are eaten by small creatures, which are eaten by larger creatures,

and up and up and up to the seeming top of the food web, except that this is a web, so there's no

real top. Even humans are eventually devoured for their energy when they die, decomposed by

bacteria and fungi, and returned to the seemingly lower levels of the food web, from whence our species ancestors originally came.

So you can have biological networks that are unified by their sharing of energy, like a food

web. And there are also other sorts of intra-species networks, like those made up of pollinators

and plants, or those made up of

entities from the same species like networks of termites working together, divvying up labor

and optimizing their task allocation to build massive complex mounds, or between bottlenose

dolphins who divvy up hunting and territorial defense

responsibilities. But you can also find this type of network inside what we would usually consider

to be a single organism. Metabolic networks, for instance, are made up of an insanely complex

set of physical processes that take place within a cell.

And these processes determine the physiological and biochemical properties of that cell.

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