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Ecosystems, Energy, And Nutrient Cycles
Energy is the capacity to perform work, and it can only be measured in relation to how it affects matter. All organisms require energy to stay alive. All organisms also transform energy. Energy cannot be created or lost, it can only be transferred and transformed. Therefore, in order to perform any kind of function (or work) the body needs energy (the capacity to perform work), and since the body cannot create new energy, it must get energy from outside sources. All energy that is exerted within an organism is transformed into a new kind of energy, and all organisms are energy transformers. All chemical reactions in cells require energy.
Within an ecosystem, energy transfers from one organism to another. This begins with producers, then energy transfers to consumers, and then to more consumers. Producers make their own food by utilizing outside energy, such as plants use photosynthesis to create food using the energy in sunlight. Consumers, however, must obtain energy from either producers or other consumers in the form of eating them. There are three kinds of consumers: herbivores, carnivores, and omnivores. The herbivore only eats producers...
Carnivores eat only other consumers, meaning that they eat only other animals and no plants. Omnivores will eat either consumers or producers, meaning that they can eat both plants and other animals. (One of the organisms I previously observed is an interesting break from the norm of the food cycle; the Venus Fly Trap is both a producer and a consumer!) So the path that energy takes through an ecosystem is from the sun, which is the main source of energy for all nutrients, to the producers, that create food using energy from the sun and the soil, to the consumers, that eat the plants and convert the energy that the plants have taken from the sun and the soil into new forms of energy, and then to more consumers, who may eat only other animals that are also consumer or eat both other animals and the plants.
Inorganic matter, or all that is not a living thing nor a product of a living thing. Inorganic matter includes water, gasses, salts, acids, bases, and also inorganic forms of nutrients such as nitrogen, potassium, and phosphorus.
Inorganic matter moves through the ecosystem when plants…
Bibliography
Campbell, Neil and Reece, Jane. Biology. Pearsons Higher Education, 2001.
Taylor, Martha. Student Study Guide for Biology. Pearson Benjamin Cummings, 1999.
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Biology Summary A population of grasshoppers in the Kansas prairie has two color phenotypes, green and brown. Typically, the prairie receives adequate water to maintain healthy, green grass. Assume a population of birds that eats grasshoppers moves into the prairie. How will that affect natural selection of the grasshoppers? How might this change in a drought year? In this instance the grasshoppers which are most suitably adapted to current conditions will be
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