gosh this is hard when your in independent studies please help?

Question

why are there fewer organisms at the top of the energy pyramid than the bottom? What happens to energy as it passes from one trophic level to another? Trace the transfer of nitrogen in the nitrogen cycle, beginning in the atmosphere.

Answer 1

First question: Think about how many blades of grass a cow needs to eat to survive. Then think about how many cows a human eats to survive.

Second question: Think about how much energy a cow uses before it is eaten. What happens to that energy?

Third question: Nitrogen in the soil is absorbed by plants. Where does it go from there?

Answer 2

Life tends to mimic itself on all levels. You see the same example in a Business Pyramid. There are fewer at the top level divisions of management. As you move further down the chain, there are more.

From a Managerial Perspective, you'll have a manager that oversees the production of 10 - 20 employees. Then you'll have the manager's manager that manages 10 - 20 managers that manage those other employees.

When you're at the top issuing orders in the Chain of Command, it gets disseminated through all levels.

For example, when I give a directive to my Engineering Department, I don't know the specifics of how they do their job. They're the experts in their field. They'll take the instructions I give them and then fashion or mold their projects around what I do.

In your question, you can see Nitrogen in the atmosphere processed by plants and algae. Then there are microscopic organisms that feed off the plants and algae. Then there are bigger organisms that feed off of the organisms that fed off of the plants and algae.

If you surf the Web, you'll run across diagrams that will show a picture of a tiny fish being eaten by another bigger fish with another fish behind it with its mouth open to eat that fish that has another larger fish about to eat that.

That's a comical interpretation of the Cycle of Life. So the Nitrogen that is from the Periodic Table gets "harnessed" like energy from the smallest organisms that are consumed by larger organisms.

The process repeats until the largest organism at the top of the food chain consumes it.

If you want a visual example, go watch "Lion King." James Earl Jones as Mufasa is teaching his lion cub Simba about the "Circle of Life."

Mufasa says that the grass gets eaten by the Antelope that gets eaten by the Lions and then when the Lions die, they get absorbed back into the ground to be consumed by the grass that is eaten by the Antelope that were consumed by the Lion that used to feed off the Antelope but is now food for the grass.

Heaven forbid that some of the cartoons that people watch actually have some redeeming educational value.