ORGANISMS AND THEIR

ENVIRONMENT
IGCSE BIOLOGY
State that the Sun is the principal source of
energy input to biological systems-energy
flow
• All living organisms need energy.
• Organisms get energy from food, by respiration.
• Nearly all living things depend on the Sun to provide
energy.
• Some of the energy of sunlight is captured by
photosynthesising plants and used to make glucose,
starch and other organic substances such as fats and
proteins.
• When the plant needs energy, it breaks down some of
its food by respiration.
 Flow of energy-food chains
• Animals get their food , and therefore their
energy, by ingesting plants, or by eating animals
which have eaten plants.
• The sequence by which energy , in the form of
chemical energy in food, passes from a plant to
an animal and then to other animals, is called a
food chain.
• Many different food chains link to form a food
web.
A food chain
A food web
 Key definitions

• A food chain shows the transfer of energy from one organism

to the next, beginning with a producer.
• A food web is a network of interconnected food chains.
• A producer is an organism that makes its own organic nutrients,
usually using energy from sunlight, through photosynthesis.
• A consumer is an organism that gets its energy from feeding on
other organisms.
• A herbivore is an animal that gets its energy by eating plants.
• A carnivore is an animal that gets its energy by eating other
animals.
• A decomposer is an organism that gets its energy from dead or
waste organic material.
 Producers and consumers
• Every food chain begins with green plants because can
capture the energy from sunlight.
• They are called producers because they produce food.
• Animals are called consumers.
• An animal which eats plants is called a primary
consumer.
• An animal that eats a primary consumer is a secondary
consumer.
• Primary consumers are also called herbivores and higher
level consumers are carnivores.
 Pyramid of numbers
• If we count the numbers of organisms at
different positions in a food chain, we usually
find that there are more plants than animals,
and more herbivores than carnivores.
• We can show this by drawing a kind of graph
called a pyramid of numbers.
• In the pyramid the size of each block represents
the number of organisms at that step in the
food chain.
A pyramid of numbers
 Pyramids of numbers

• The width of the bands is meant to represent the

relative number of organisms at each trophic level.
• So the diagrams are sometimes called pyramids of
numbers.
• However, you can probably think of situations where a
pyramid of numbers would not show the same effect.
• For example, a single sycamore tree may provide food
for thousands of greenfly.
• One oak tree may feed hundreds of caterpillars. In
these cases the pyramid of numbers is upside-down,
Inverted pyramid of numbers
 Energy losses
• As energy is passed along a food chain, some of it is lost to the
environment. This happens in many ways:
• 1) when an organism uses food for respiration, some of the energy
released from food is lost as heat energy to the environment.
• 2) when one organism eats another, it rarely eats absolutely all of
it. For example when a grasshopper may eat almost all of the parts
of the plant above the ground, but it will not eat the roots. So not
all of the energy in the plant is transferred to grasshoppers.
• 3) when an animal eats another organisms as food, enzymes in its
digestive system break down most of the large food molecules, so
that they can be absorbed. But not all the food molecules are
digested and absorbed, and most are eventually lost from the body
as faeces. These faeces contain energy that is lost from this food
chain.
 Effect of energy losses on food chains
• Due to energy losses in respiration, as faeces and
other ways , the further you go along a food chain
the less energy is available for each successive
group of organisms.
• Plants get energy from the sun, but only a fraction
of this energy is absorbed by grasshoppers or
primary consumers such as fly-catchers.
• This explains why there are usually more plants
than animals in an ecosystem.
 Trophic levels
• Key definitions
• The trophic level of an organism is its position in a food chain, food web
or pyramid of numbers or biomass.
• Trophic means feeding.
• There is less energy available as you go up trophic levels , so there are
fewer organisms at each level.
• This loss of energy limits the length of food chains.
• Food chains rarely have more than five trophic levels ,as there is not
enough energy left to support a sixth.
• Many organisms feed at more than one trophic level.
• Humans for example, eat vegetables, making them primary consumers,
they eat meat and drink milk, making them secondary consumers.
• When humans eat predatory fish such as Salmon they become tertiary
consumers.
 Pyramids of biomass

• As stated earlier, displaying food chains using pyramids of number,

such as those shown in can produce inverted pyramids.
• This is because the top consumers may be represented by large
numbers of very small organisms, for example, fleas feeding on an
owl.
• The way around this problem is to consider not the single tree, but
the mass of the leaves that it produces in the growing season, and
the mass of the insects that can live on them.
• Biomass is the term used when the mass of living organisms is being
considered, and pyramids of biomass can be constructed .
• A pyramid of biomass is nearly always the correct pyramid shape.
TROPHIC LEVELS
 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
 ENERGY LOSSES
• The majority of the energy an organism receives gets ‘lost’ (or ‘used’) through:
– making waste products eg (urine) that get removed from the organism
– as movement
– as heat (in mammals and birds that maintain a constant body temperature)
– 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: eat a huge number of them
every day to get the amount of energy it needed to survive (are there that
many barn owls close together?)
• not expend much energy itself hunting them (is this likely
ENERGY LOSSES ALONG A FOOD CHAIN
 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
ENERGY TRANSFER IN HUMAN FOOD CHAINS

• 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)