Why is an energy pyramid always a pyramid?

That is, why does the amount of available

always decrease as you move up a food chain? We have already seen two good reasons: First,
some organisms at one level of a food chain are not eaten by organisms at the next level of the
food chain. And, second, some energy from food is lost in feces or goes into maintenance.
A lot of the energy we call “maintenance” is energy lost to the environment as heat. This
is because, as organisms carry out their activities, energy is constantly being lost as heat. Why?
Because of the second law of thermodynamics, which says that natural systems tend to move
from organized energy states to disorganized energy states. That is, useful energy turns into
unusable energy, or heat. Any time energy is converted from one form into another—including
during the chemical reactions in living things—some energy turns into heat.
Let’s consider just one set of chemical reactions—the reactions that occur during cellular
respiration. You may remember that living organisms use cellular respiration to burn glucose and
make ATP. The chemical reaction for burning glucose is

C6H12O6 + 6O2 6CO2 + 6H2O + 673 kcal/mole

That is, glucose and oxygen react to form carbon dioxide and water, releasing 673
kilocalories of energy per mole in the process. If this reaction were perfectly efficient in
organisms, the entire 673 kilocalories per mole released from burning glucose would be captured
as ATP. Is it?
We know that about 38 molecules of ADP are converted into ATP as the result of
burning a single glucose molecule. ATP then provides 7 kilocalories per mole when it is broken
down into ADP and phosphate during cellular processes. But, 38 x 7 = 266, much less than 673.
Clearly, a lot of energy is missing! What happened to it? It was lost to the environment as heat.
In mammals and birds, heat lost this way contributes to the maintenance of stable, warm body
temperatures. However, this heat is shed eventually to the environment as well. Once we
consider the fact that every chemical reaction involves some energy loss to the environment, it
becomes clear why so much energy leaks from one level in the food chain to the next (Figure
21.35). In fact, all the energy that Earth receives from the Sun is eventually lost as heat.