Describes the amount of energyEnergy and nutrients are the same thing. Plants capture energy from the Sun and store it in chemicals, via the process of photosynthesis. The excess greenery and waste that plants create, contain chemicals that animals can eat, in order to build their own bodies and reproduce. When a chemical is used this way, we call it a nutrient. As we More contained within one step of the food chainA single thread in a food web illustrating the chain of animals that eat each other. At the base of the food chain are small high-energy (fast metabolism) animals and at the other end large low metabolism animals. An example would be whales eating krill that eat plankton that eat algae. Or lions that eat gazelles that eat grass. More. Animals in one trophic level utilise about 90% of the energy they absorb for living, emitting the rest as heat and waste. This means the next step up the trophic chain (e.g. the bigger animals that eat them) only have access to about 10% of the energy below them. At each step up the food chain, the amount of available energy declines and animals get bigger, with lower rates of metabolism. A variation in this trend occurs on land with plants. Herbivores only consumer about 1% of the energy consumed by plants, which instead store 99% as biomassThe weight of living organisms. Biomass can be measured in relation to the amount of carbon, the dry weight (with all moisture removed) or living weight. In general it can be used to describe the volume of energy that is contained inside systems, as the size of animals relates to their metabolism and therefore, how much energy they contain and More [1]. This is still a very significant amount of energy, if unregulated by animals.
- Burgess, M & Gaines, S (2018) The scale of life and its lessons for humanity. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Jun 2018, 115 (25) 6328-6330; https://www.pnas.org/content/115/25/6328
