Term II Class 8
The City School
Handout #: 4.9
Topic: Food Chains and Food Webs
By reading this handout, learners will be able to:
• Describe the noncyclic, unidirectional flow of energy through the food chains
• Construct pyramid of numbers
• Examine role of decomposers in recycling the nutrients in the environment
• Recognize that plants benefit from waste products and the decay of organisms
Trophic Levels
• Trophic levels describe the position of an organism in a food chain, web or pyramid
• Animals (known as consumers) can be at different trophic levels within the same food web as
they may eat both primary, secondary and / or tertiary consumers
• Energy flows from the sun to the first trophic level (producers) in the form of light
• Producers convert light energy into chemical energy and it flows in this form from one consumer
to the next
• Eventually all energy is transferred to the environment – energy is passed on from one level to
the next with some being used and lost at each stage
• Energy flow is a non-cyclical process – once the energy gets to the top of the food chain or web, it
is not recycled but ‘lost’ to the environment
• This is in direct contrast to the chemical elements that organisms are made out of, which are
repeatedly recycled.
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Transfer of Energy
• In order for the energy to be passed on, it has to be consumed (eaten)
• However not all of the energy grass plants receive goes into making new cells that can be eaten
• The same goes for the energy the vole gets from the grass, and the energy the barn owl gets from
the vole
• Only the energy that is made into new cells remains with the organism to be passed on
• Even then, some of this energy does not get consumed - for example few organisms eat an entire
organism, including roots of plants or bones of animals - but energy is still stored in these parts
and so it does not get passed on
• The majority of the energy an organism receives gets ‘lost’ (or ‘used’) through:
o making waste products eg (urine) that get removed from the organism
o as movement
o as heat (in mammals and birds that maintain a constant body temperature)
o as undigested waste (faeces) that is removed from the body and provides food for decomposers
• This inefficient loss of energy at each trophic level explains why food chains are rarely more than 5
organisms long
• In the example above, something that preyed regularly on the barn owl would only get 0.1J of
energy from each barn owl it ate
• In order to survive, it would have to:
o eat a huge number of them every day to get the amount of energy it needed to survive .
Term II Class 8
Energy Transfer in Human Food Chains
• Humans are omnivores, obtaining energy from both plants and animals, and this gives us a choice
of what we eat
• These choices, however, have an impact on what we grow and how we use ecosystems
• Think of the following food chains both involving humans:
wheat → cow → human
wheat → human
• Given what we know about energy transfer in food chains, it is clear that if humans eat the
wheat there is much more energy available to them than if they eat the cows that eat the
wheat
• This is because energy is lost from the cows, so there is less available to pass on to humans
• Therefore, it is more energy efficient within a crop food chain for humans to be the
herbivores rather than the carnivores
• In reality, we often feed animals on plants that we cannot eat (eg grass) or that are too widely
distributed for us to collect (eg algae in the ocean which form the food of fish we eat).
Pyramids of Number
• A pyramid of numbers shows how many organisms we are talking about at each level of a food
chain.
• The width of the box indicates the number of organisms at that trophic level
• The producer always goes at the bottom of the pyramid.
• For example, consider the following food chain:
Term II Class 8
• So, a pyramid of numbers for this food chain would look like this:
• Despite the name (and the example above), a pyramid of numbers doesn’t always have to be
pyramid-shaped, for example:
• This is because the size of the organism is also important - one large organism, like the oak tree
in the pyramid above, contains enough energy to support many smaller organisms (the insects).
Term II Class 8
Rules to remember when drawing a pyramid of numbers:
• You cannot change the trophic level of the organisms - they must stay in the same order
as in the food chain with producers on the bottom, followed by primary consumers, then
secondary consumers, then tertiary consumers.
• Generally, the larger an individual organism is, the less of them there are.
Decomposers:
Decomposers feed on dead things: dead plant materials such as leaf litter and wood, animal carcasses,
and feces. They perform a valuable service as Earth’s cleanup crew. Without decomposers, dead leaves,
dead insects, and dead animals would pile up everywhere. Imagine what the world would look like!
More importantly, decomposers make vital nutrients available to an ecosystem’s primary producers—
usually plants and algae. Decomposers break apart complex organic materials into more elementary
substances: water and carbon dioxide, plus simple compounds containing nitrogen, phosphorus, and
calcium. All of these components are substances that plants need to grow.
Some decomposers are specialized and break down only a certain kind of dead organism. Others are
generalists that feed on lots of different materials. Thanks to decomposers, nutrients get added back to
the soil or water, so the producers can use them to grow and reproduce.
Most decomposers are microscopic organisms, including protozoa and bacteria. Other decomposers are
big enough to see without a microscope. They include fungi along with invertebrate organisms sometimes
called detritivores, which include earthworms, termites, and millipedes.
Fungi are important decomposers, especially in forests. Some kinds of fungi, such as mushrooms, look like
plants. But fungi do not contain chlorophyll, the pigment that green plants use to make their own food
with the energy of sunlight. Instead, fungi get all their nutrients from dead materials that they break
down with special enzymes.
