- oligotrophic caves: are caves characterized from an insufficient availability of organic substances; the water enters only a little of organic matter and therefore the fauna is scarce, but the few species that lives in this caves are often very specialized; here of usual the base of the feeding is represented by autotrophic bacterial floras, that succeed in to synthetize organic substances from the mineral substratum (solfobacteria, nitrobacteria, ferrobacteria, etc.);

- eutrophic caves: are caves characterized by the abundant presence organic substance of animal origin and in particular by guano of bats, that it covers one meaningful portion of the surface of the cavity; such caves are populated during all or part of the year by great colonies of Chiroptera;

- distrophic caves: are caves characterized by massive accumulates of vegetable detritus and instead poor of guano or other resources of animal nature.

However in the eutrophic and distrophic caves there is a good energetic potential, the fauna is constituted by various species, numerically abundant, but less specialized.

In an outline of a food chain more the relations are complex, plus truhful is the scheme: in fact the ecological equilibrium is based on several ecological niches.

In the food pyramid, after the autotrophic and eterotrophic bacteria (these last ones are of external origin and use organic substances already processed), follows a bacteriophage microfauna, that lives in the clays and mud where the limivore fauna finds maintenance. The limivores represent food for their own predators. Classics examples of limivores are the earthworms, a lot of crustaceans and several larvas of insects.

Carnivores, or better predators, are the Chilopoda, the Opiliones, the pseudoscorpions, the spiders, a lot of coleopters.

Between the detritivores we find Diplopoda, crustaceans, several insects.

Other groups are:

- the guanobious , that are the organisms that obtain nutriment from the nitrogenous compounds contained in the guano (we remember also that the presence of bats increases number of the necrophage species that take advantage of the rests of bats or of others that parasite them like acarus and fleas);

- the parasites that, habitual hosts of bats and other troglofile mammals, can also to cling to other arthropods;

- the coprophage that feed excrements of other organisms;

- the saprophage that feed organic substances in decomposition both vegetable (phytosaprofage) and animal (zoosaprophage).

According to the opinion of some authors the limits between saprophage and carnivores are less precise in the hypogean than in the epigean environment, beacause of a certain facility to pass from one diet to the other.

The predation is the form more direct of relation between different species. But in the caves of limited extension, with insufficient trophic resources, there is with greater evidence also an other form of relation, the competition for the conquest of the food. The intensity of this relation is directly proportional to the overlapping of the ecological niches of the competitors. It's rare to recover in one same cave species pertaining to the same genus or too similar. If this occur, the ecological niches of the species are sufficiently distinct.