APES Food for thought...

Trophic levels
Lesly Quezada Plants make food during photosynthesis; they are called primary producers or autotrophs. Animals eat the food. They are known as consumers or heterotrophs. 1. What does the suffix troph mean? - "organism that gets nourishment from a (specified) source"

2. What do you think a trophic level is? -The specific position and organism has on a food chain

3. How about food chains, food webs? Compare and contrast those terms you learned in biology. -Food chains shows broad views of the food source in an ecosystem or a location and a food web is a bigger overview that is in detailed

4. Quickly sketch a food chain using organisms that might be found on our school grounds. a. What do you have to do to turn it into a food web? Do so. -To turn it into a food web it has to have every specific animal in the area in Linda vista and has to have all the predators and all the animals that can be eaten and vise verso.

5. Look at the following diagrams called Energy Pyramids. a. What do they all have in common? -What they all have in common is that the keystone animal is on top and the build up on each other b. How are they different from one another? -The way that they are different is that many of the pyramids have just one animal in each category but some have more.

6. Why are there are more organisms at the base and less organisms as you travel up the pyramid?

- There is more on the bottom because the ones on top have fewer predators and most animals are a food source for other animals. a. Any idea what an energy pyramid shows? -I think that energy shows for example ocean animals the energy the level they are in and or how much energy is necessary for them to contain from the sun to survive.

7. Two of the pyramids have numbers. Do you see a pattern in the numbers? -I do wee the numbered pyramids and i do see the pattern and plus i think they are all multiplying by 10. a. What might the numbers mean? -The numbers might mean the energy these animals need the sun to survive Use the following for your calculations. Show all work with units! You can live on 1 hen per day for a year 1 hen eats 25 grasshoppers a day (25 gh/day) 1000 gh have a mass of 1 kg 1 gh requires about 30g soy/yr 1 human requires about 600 gh/day Dry soybeans have provide about 3.3 cal/g 1. Calculate the number of gh a hen needs to eat per year. 25x 365= 9,125 gh/peryear 2. How many gh are needed for a years supply of hens for you? You will need 3,330,625 gh/per year 3. What is the total mass in kg, of the gh needed to feed all the hens for one year? You will need 3,300,625,000 kg per year 3,300,625 x 1000= 3,300,625,000 4. How many kg of soybeans are needed to feed all the gh for one year? 3,330,625 x 30= 3,231,606,250 soybeans per ear 5. Sources tell us that Native American Indians ate gh. So you can too! These early Americans could collect about 90 kg of gh per hour, when they were abundant. How many people could the gh feed, compared to the one person that the hen fed? (Perhaps you could dip the gh in chocolate.)

24 x 90 = 2,160 one day x 365 = 788,400/ 600 it scan feed 1,314 people 6. You need to consume 3000 calories/day. If you ate only soybeans how many grams of soybeans would you have to eat per day for calories alone? 600 soybeans x 3.3 its 1,980 calories . 7. Cows produce about 19 kg protein/acre/year and soy produces 200 kg of protein/acre/year. a. Which is more efficient to eat? Why? b. Have you ever eaten a soy burger (veggie burger)? Why or why not? The soy produces more so i think it will be more efficient because the numbers are even tripled in size. I have not because I am not a vegetarian and I havent gotten curious on how they taste. 8. In theory, the earth could support many more people if we ate at a lower trophic level. a. List 2 benefits of doing this. -It would be helpful because we would be able to sustain more people -It is better to eat healthier than to consume not healthy foods. b. List 2 drawbacks of eating lower on the food chain. -Without balancing it there might be too much of something which could be bad -There wont be a diversity among the animals c. What are some benefits of being a vegetarian? -The benefit of being a vegetarian is that we save more animals and less carbon dioxide due to cow will be in the air -Their might be a chance in between where we will feed more people with more production

d. What are some drawbacks? -We might not get those nutrients we need for our bodies because we still need meat but too much is bad for our bodies 9. And then there are fish to eat! Large predatory fish usually are found at the 3rd or 4th trophic level of an energy pyramid. What does this mean in terms of energy loss? -This means that they have a less energy 10. Large predatory animals can also be problematic to eat because of bioaccumulation and biomagnification of toxins such as lead or mercury in their habitats. What do those two big words mean and why should this be considered when discussing food chains and trophic levels?

- For example if one of the animals eats mercury then it passes to the animal that eats them and so on until it reaches us such as when we eat foods like fish. -Bioaccumulation: increase in concentration of a pollutant from the environment to the first organism in a food chain Biomagnifications: increase in concentration of a pollutant from one link in a food chain to another So in other words the Bioaccumulation is the mercury and how much the first organism contained it so in when it gets into the first organism and passes through the food chain it is now Biomagnifications.

11. Do you think about the food you eat? Why or why not? - I sometimes take care of what I eat because it is important to be healthy in all possible ways, but also I sometimes dont think about it I just eat.