Living Things Need Energy

The Energy Connection

Living Things Need Energy

Producers: Organisms that use sunlight directly to make food.

To do this, most do a process called photosynthesis.

grasses

Trees

plants

bacteria

Living Things Need Energy

Consumers: Must eat producers or another consumer to get energy.

Herbivore Carnivore Omnivore Scavenger

Weird Weird ScienceScience

Turkey vultures have an acute sense of smell. A biologist once put decaying carcasses in metal containers, hid the containers in California foothills, and used a fan to diffuse the odor. Turkey vultures were soon soaring overhead. Engineers once pumped ethyl mercaptan, which smells like rotting flesh, into natural-gas lines. They located leaks by watching for turkey vultures attracted to the pipeline!

Scavenger

Misconception Alert

The North American black bear and the grizzly are not carnivores. They are omnivores. Besides eating mammals and fish, both bears eat berries and roots. Black bears also eat pine cones, acorns, and insects. Grizzlies sometimes even eat grass.

Decomposers

Organisms that get their food by breaking down the remains of dead organisms.

Fungi

Bacteria

Earthworms

Food Chain

Food Web

Math and More

There are 12,000 units of the sun’s energy available to grass at the base of an energy pyramid. Grass stores in its tissues 10 % of the available energy, so that energy becomes available to the next consumer, a rabbit. The rabbit, a consumer of grass, store 10% of the energy that was stored in the grass. A coyote, a consumer of rabbits, stores 10% of the energy that was stored by the rabbit. Calculate the units of food energy stored in the grass, the rabbit, and the coyote.

Energy Pyramid

Draw an energy pyramid for a river ecosystem that contain four levels; aquatic plants,insect larvae, bluegill fish, and a largemouth bass. The plants obtain 10,000 units of energy from the sun. If each level uses 90% of the energy it receives from the previous level, how many units of energy are available to the bass?

Is That a Fact

In 1989, the National Conservancy purchased 30,000 acres of grassland in Oklahoma. The conservancy’s goal is “the restoration of a functioning tall-grass prairie ecosystem”. The land has been grazed by cattle but never plowed; the restoration will allow the more than 700 prairie plant species to reestablish themselves. A healthy prairie is also home to 300 bird species, 80 mammal species, and hundreds of thousands of insect species. Biologists have reintroduced bison, whose grazing is an integral part of the prairie food web.

Wolves and the Energy Pyramid

Gray wolves are a consumer species that can control the population of many species.

Their diet ranges from lizards to elk.

Wolves and the Energy Pyramid

The wolves were almost wiped out with the settlement of the wilderness. This left species like the elk without control. That lead to overgrazing and starvation.

Wolves and the Energy Pyramid

Yellowstone National Park has helped restore the gray wolves.

Wolves and the Energy PyramidRead 12-13

Describe how the Gray Wolf is a consumer.

What is the social structure of the Gray Wolf ?

How do Gray Wolves nurture their young?

Why are Gray Wolves needed in the Yellowstone food Web?

RETURN OF THE WOLF

                                            

 After an absence of more than 50

years, the gray wolf (Canis lupus) once again runs beneath the night skies of Yellowstone

National Park.