The Bio Pyramid

Posted under environment by Alison Heath

In the ongoing energy debate, biomass energy is getting a lot of play among politicians. It’s really helpful if you understand the bio pyramid so you can understand this.

There is an order of classification for all the organisms here. You’ll find that an organism can be classified in different ways to show connections with other organisms. One way to classify organisms is through the food chain. In this way, we can see how animals and other organisms relate to each other based on what they consume.

The bio pyramid is an important way of looking at the food chain. A bio pyramid is a graphical chart that shows the comparative mass of the consumers to the producers in the food chain. The bio pyramid is especially helpful in determining how energy is transferred from the bottom level of the pyramid to the top.

Every level in a bio pyramid is composed of a trophic level. Trophic levels are groupings of different “consumer” groups, such as primary producers (usually just plants or other photosynthetic organisms) rising all the way up to carnivores (such as humans). While a typical biological pyramid might group these consumers in order of energy produced, a bio pyramid shows them in order of total mass from highest to lowest. This often means that the primary consumers, such as the plants, are at the bottom because they are more numerous and take up more mass. The levels are then built upon by how many more levels of organisms can survive on those below. An example can be seen in this sea bio pyramid:

It would take 1,000,000 kg of phytoplankton (1st level), to feed 100,000 kg of zooplankton (2nd level), to feed 10,000 kg of shrimp (3rd level), to finally feed 1,000 kg of large fish. The final level would only be able too have 100 kg of shark.

So the bio pyramid will show that there is inefficiency in the food chain, and makes if possible for researchers to know that if a level was skipped, there would be energy conserved. Given this fact, a bio pyramid is an important tool when looking at the laws of conservation of energy among different classes of organisms.

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