Question

Write any two ways of energy flowing through an ecosystem

Answer 1

What this is talking about is calories, the amount of energy an organism can gain by consuming an energy source - be it sunlight,inorganic nutrients, plants, animal meat, etc.If you recall the typical food chain or food web, plants use nutrients from the soil, water, and sunlight, to produce their own energy via photosynthesis. Plants are eaten by herbivores, and herbivores are eaten by carnivores. When aliving thing dies, its body and all the energy and nutrients stored inside that weren’t eaten by scavengers return to the soils by decomposers, who themselves get some of the energy, and what’s left replenishes the soil.That’s a simplified picture of how it works. However, eachtime, the organism consuming the food source only obtains around 10% of the energy from that source (why is complex and I’m not sure I could explain that well). This is the reason that top-tier carnivores are very few in an ecosystem compared to the numbers of prey, because by the time they are consuming the meat of herbivores and lesser predators they killed, only a very small proportion of the original energy is left for them.There are some exceptions to this picture, such as smallecosystems in deep oceans fed by hydrothermal vents that spurt out nutrients as well as heat, but again, the above is the general idea.