Week 7: Food Webs

 The question we were focus don this week during lab was: Where does living stuff come from? Where does it go?

To investigate this question, we focused on food chains and food webs and did a discussion and a simulation to demonstrate the energy moving through the food chain. During the simulation, we all were a part of the food chain, either a producer, primary consumer, or a secondary consumer. We used beans to represent the energy. The producer started out with 100 energy, but the producer had a lot of things that used up the energy and was only left with 10 energy left in the plant. When the primary consumer eats the plant, they only got 10 energy from it and had to spend a lot of the energy on movement and reproduction, and was only left with 1 energy. When the secondary consumers eat the primary consumer, they don't get enough energy to complete their tasks, so they need to eat multiple primary consumers to get enough energy. Because of that, there aren't very many secondary consumers that can survive in one area.

By doing that simulation, we learned that as the organisms move up the food chain, there is less energy available.

I am wondering curious as to where the energy that is being used up by the plant or animal by other tasks is going?