Review the key concepts, formulae, and examples before starting your quiz.
🔑Concepts
Ecological Niche: This refers to the specific functional role or 'job' an organism performs within its community, including its use of resources and interactions with other organisms. No two species can occupy the exact same niche in the same habitat for long.
Producers (Autotrophs): Organisms like green plants that synthesize their own food using sunlight through photosynthesis. They form the base of all food chains.
Consumers (Heterotrophs): Organisms that cannot make their own food. They are classified into Primary Consumers (herbivores), Secondary Consumers (carnivores eating herbivores), and Tertiary Consumers (top predators).
Decomposers (Saprotrophs): Organisms like fungi and bacteria that break down dead organic matter into simpler nutrients, recycling them back into the soil. They maintain the harmony of the ecosystem.
The 10% Law: In an ecosystem, only about of the energy available at one trophic level is passed on to the next level. The rest is lost as heat or used for metabolic processes.
Trophic Levels: These are the sequential steps in a food chain, starting from producers at the first level to top carnivores at the highest level.
📐Formulae
💡Examples
Problem 1:
In a grassland ecosystem, if the producers (plants) trap of solar energy, calculate the energy available to the secondary consumer (frog) in the food chain: .
Solution:
- Energy at Producer level = .
- Energy at Primary Consumer (Grasshopper) = .
- Energy at Secondary Consumer (Frog) = .
Explanation:
According to the law, only one-tenth of the energy is passed to each subsequent trophic level.
Problem 2:
Calculate the amount of energy lost as heat when moving from a producer with of energy to a primary consumer.
Solution:
Energy transferred to primary consumer = . Energy lost as heat: Total energy lost = .
Explanation:
Energy lost is the difference between the total energy at the current level and the energy actually transferred to the next level ().