In a food pyramid, there is typically less biomass at the top (i.e., there are very few individual tertiary consumers, whereas there are numerous individual producers). In three to five sentences, explain this phenomenon, citing evidence relating to energy flow and how plants support ecosystems. (4 points)
(completely original and like a 8th grader wrote it)
1 answer
In a food pyramid, there's less biomass at the top because energy gets lost as it moves up the trophic levels. Producers like plants can turn light energy into food through photosynthesis, so they have a lot of energy. But when animals eat plants, they only get some of that energy, and when other animals eat those animals, they get even less. So by the time you get to the top of the food pyramid, there's not much energy left to support a lot of individual animals. Plants are super important because they start the whole food chain and provide energy for all the other animals in the ecosystem.