Understanding energy transfer

2.3.2

Transfer of energy in an ecosystem

Food chains show energy transfer. Tropic level is the level at which an organism feeds. Organisms can be members of more than one food chain, and often feed at different tropic levels in different chains. Food webs help to understand how energy flows through the whole ecosystem.

Efficiency of energy transfer

At each trophic level some energy is lost from the food chain, and is therefore unavailable to the organism at the next trophic level. At each trophic level living organisms need energy to carry out life processes. Respiraton releases energy from organic molecules like glucose. some of this is eventually converted to heat. Energy remains stored in dead organisms and waste material, which is then only available to decomposers, such as fungi and bacteria. Therefore there is less energy availabe to sustain living tissue at igher levels of the food chain, s less living tissue can be kept alive. When organisms in a food chain are the same size there will be less consumers at the higher levels. Ecologists draw a pyramid of numbers to represent this iea. The area of each bar in the pyramid is proportional to the number of individuals. They can be drawn for individual food chains or for an entire ecosystem.

Measuring efficiancy
Pyramids of Biomass
Pyramids of biomass measure how much living tissue exists at each level. The bars are proportional to the dry mass of all the organisms at that trophic level. To do this an ecologist would collect all the organisms and put them in n oven at 80c until all the water has been evaporated. But this is destructive to the ecosystem, so they often just measure the wet mass of the organisms and calculate the dry mass on the basis of the previously established data.

Pyramids of Energy
These are an alternative to pyramids of biomass. They involve burning the organisms in a calorimeter and working out how much heat energy is released per gram - this is calculated from the temperature rise of a known mass of water. Given that this too is destructive and also rather time - consuming, ecologists often revert to using pyramids of biomass instead.

Productivity
Pyramids of energy have limitations; they only take a snapshot of an ecosystem at one moment in time and because population sizes can fluctuate over time, this may provide a distorted idea of the efficiency of energy transfer. Ecologists often look at the rate at which energy passes through each trophic level, drawing a pyramid of energy flow. This rate if energy flow is called productivity. Productivity gives an idea of how much energy is available to the organisms at a partiular trophic level, per unit area, in a given amount of time. At the base of the food chain, the productivity of plants is called the primary productivity. The gross primary productivity is the te at which plan convert light energy into chemical energy.

Questions
Explain why ecologists may prefer to draw a food web instead of a food chain? To show how energy flows through a whole ecosystem rather than just one food chain. Why would an ecologist rather draw a pyramid of energy instead of a pyramid of biomass? Because a pyrmid of energy provides a more accurate picture of energy at each trophic level. This is because dry mass in different organisms may release different amounts of energy. Suggest why there are fewer individuals at higher trophic levels in the food chain? Because enery leaves the food chain at each trophic level, there is less energy available at each successive trophic level, meaning fewer and fewer organisms can survive at higher and higher trophic levels.