Question

What type of changes occur in the amount of energy during a transfer from plants to Apex consumers

Answer 1

Energy is lost as it gets transferred from one organism to another. The efficiency of this energy is measured by NPE and TLTE.

# Energy decreases as it moves up from one trophic level to another because energy is lost as metabolic heat when the organism of one trophic level consumes the organisms of another trophic level.

# Trophic Level Transfer Efficiency (TLTE) measures the amount of energy transferred in each trophic level.

# Net Production Efficiency (NPE) measures how effectively the released energy is utilized in each trophic level.

Answer 2

(1) Plants of the ecosystems store some of the solar energy in the form of food.

(2) before reaching the decomposers, this energy is passed on from one trophic level to the next.

(3) at every topic level, some amount of energy is used by the organism for its own life processes and some amount of energy is lost to the surroundings.

(4) decomposers dissipate some amount of energy in the form of heat.

(5) However, no part of the energy ever returns to the sun. Hence, such passage of energy is referred to as 'one way' transport.

(6) Therefore, energy is minimum at the base of the pyramid and is least at the apex, e.g. phytoplanktons which form the base of pyramid have 10,000 kcal of energy while humans at Apex have 10 kcal of energy.