BiologyCode 5090
Energy flow
What this topic asks you to be able to do
- Understand that most biological systems get their energy input mainly from the Sun
- Explain why the majority of living things cannot survive without photosynthesis
- Describe how energy moves along food chains and webs, including the energy arriving as light and the energy held within living organisms, and its final passage into the environment
- Construct simple food chains and interpret them
- Know what is meant by the terms producer, consumer, herbivore, carnivore and decomposer
- Describe a food web as a network formed by food chains that are linked together, and construct and interpret food webs
- Explain why energy is transferred inefficiently between trophic levels
- Account for why food chains rarely contain more than four trophic levels
- Account for why people gain more energy efficiency by eating crop plants directly than by eating livestock raised on those crop plants
- Construct pyramids of numbers, biomass and energy, then interpret them