ENERGY FLOW WITHIN A FOOD CHAIN OR FOOD WEB

All living organism need energy to carry out life processes; for example, your body uses
energy to grow, move, inhale and eat. The energy that your body is using came from your
food. If you made a food web for everything you eat, you would find that all the energy you
use was trapped by plants from the Sun. Ultimately all energy for life comes from the Sun.

Trapping the Sun’s energy

Plants use the Sun’s energy to make food during photosynthesis. During photosynthesis
carbon dioxide and water are combined to make glucose and oxygen.

Carbon dioxide + water → oxygen + glucose

The glucose is then used to make other carbohydrates, lipids and proteins and everything else
the plant needs. These become the components of food for consumers. The term ‘food’ can
thus be used for the term ‘energy’, since energy is obtained from food.
So, the energy in the light from the Sun is converted to chemical energy (as glucose and other
chemicals) in the plant. The chemical energy (as food) then passes on to the consumer as they
feed on the plants.
Food (usually glucose) is ‘burnt’ during respiration by plants and animals to release energy so
that they can carry out all the processes necessary for life.
Glucose + oxygen → energy + carbon dioxide + water
Respiration releases the energy trapped in the foods so that it can be used by the organism.
Respiration also makes carbon dioxide and water.

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 How a plant gains and loses energy
• A plant gains energy when it converts light energy to chemical energy during
photosynthesis.
• It stores some of the energy by changing the glucose it made into other chemicals.
• It uses up some food during respiration to release energy to grow and carry out other
life processes. Some of the energy that is released is lost as heat energy from the
plant.
How an animal gains and loses energy
For each animal at each trophic level:
• Energy is gained as the organism feeds
• Some of this energy is stored as tissue as the animal grows
• Some energy is lost as faeces and urine straight out of the animal’s body
• Some of the stored energy is released during respiration for the organism to stay alive
and some of that energy is lost as heat to the environment.

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 Movement of energy through a food chain

Producer – Plant Primary consumer or Secondary consumer or Tertiary consumer or

Herbivore Carnivore Carnivore/Omnivore
Energy is stored in tissues
Energy stored in tissues Energy stored in tissues Energy stored in tissues

Decomposers

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 Movement of energy through a food chain
Energy flow through a food chain or web is related to the movement of food through the
chain. The diagram above shows the movement of energy through a food chain.
The diagram shows that energy is lost at every step in the food chain. This means there is less
energy at each level for the animals in that level than the level below. The length of a food
chain will be limited by the energy loss at each level. There will come a point when there is
not enough energy in one level to support another level. There are usually not more than five
steps in any food chain.
When plants and animals die, the energy stored in the dead bodies will be passed on to the
detritivores and decomposers as they feed. They also feed on urine and faeces made by
animals.
Energy is not recycled, it moves through and out of the food chains. Energy enters a food
chain as light energy from the Sun, and is lost from every trophic level as heat energy to the
environment. Its flow is non-cyclical, which means that the energy cannot be returned to a
living organism.
The length of a food chain depends on the energy in the biomass available at each level.
Ultimately this depends on how much energy is being trapped by the producers in the chain
(their productivity). If the whole ecosystem is highly productive, then the food chains will be
longer because there will be more energy entering at the producer level of the chain. If there
is only a small amount of energy being trapped by the producers, then they can only support
fewer trophic levels. Ecosystems in equatorial regions are generally more productive than
those in higher latitudes because they get more light.
Crop plants are mass harvested for human consumption. If these plants are eaten directly by
humans, a lot more energy can obtained than if they were fed to other animals first and then
the animals eaten by humans.

Pyramids of energy
A pyramid of energy is a good way of showing the energy relationships between organisms
in different trophic levels. The figure below shows the pyramid of energy for a simple food
chain. Each block I the pyramid shows the amount of energy available to the next trophic
level.

CAN YOU EXPLAIN THE PYRAMID OF ENERGY BELOW?

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 Pyramid of Numbers
A pyramid of numbers is like a pyramid of energy but shows the number of all the organisms
at each trophic level of a food chain within a given area. Explain the pyramids below

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 Pyramid of Biomass
Instead of estimating the numbers of organisms at each trophic level we can estimate their
biomass or dry weight. From this we can construct a pyramid showing the biomass of
orgasims at a given time in each trophic level. The width of the boxes indicates the relative
amounts of biomass present at each trophic level.
Explain the pyramid below.

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Bioaccumulation
Pesticide can spread through the environment in a food chain. Pesticides (such as fungicides,
herbicides and insecticide) are chemicals that are toxic to some organisms. They work in one
of two ways, on contact or once the chemical has entered the organism. For example, a
grasshopper feeding on plants sprayed with insecticide will only need to take in a small
amount to kill it.
This can harm other animals in the food chain. For example, a bird feeding on the
grasshopper will accumulate in its body all the insecticide that the grasshopper have ingested.
So the bird may end up with levels of insecticide high enough to poison it or harm it in some
way. A hawk or other predator feeding on the small birds could end up with even higher
levels of pesticide in its body, again enough to poison or harm it. This is called
bioaccumulation or biological magnification.
A well-known example is DDT (dichlorodiphenyl-trichloroethane) which is a very effective
insecticide that was used in many countries in the 1950’s and 1960’s to control mosquitoes
which carry malaria, and to control other insect pests. However, DDT is stored in fatty tissue
so predators absorb the chemical when they eat prey that contains it. Levels of DDT that
accumulate in the bodies of top predators may be enough to kill them or to harm them in
other ways. In a study of osprey (North American birds) adult birds were found to contain 8
million times more DDT than organisms at the bottom of the food chain. These high
concentrations did not kill the birds, but caused the females to lay eggs with very thin shells.
Many eggs broke and so numbers of these birds dropped rapidly. Since 1972 the use of DDT
has been banned in many countries.

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