Asked by: Shabnam De Portilla
Asked in category: business and finance, green solutions
Last Updated: 30th Jun 2024

How can energy be lost as you climb the pyramid?

As organisms move up the trophic levels, energy decreases because they lose energy as metabolic heat and are unable to consume organisms at the next level. The trophic level transfer efficiency or TLTE (trophic level transfer efficiency) is a measure of how much energy is transferred between trophic levels.



Hence, it is not surprising that there are fewer organisms as you climb the energy pyramid.

The pyramid of energy illustrates that species diversity decreases with increasing trophic levels. This assumes that the organisms at the higher trophic levels only consume one organism. Higher organisms need to eat more food than the lower levels in order to maintain their energy levels.

What happens to biomass as you go up the pyramid? In a pyramid of biomass, you can see a biomass of organisms at different levels in the food chain. The organism may also dispose of some material and energy. Some energy is used to grow. As you go up the biomass pyramid, energy and biomass decreases from one trophic level of the biomass pyramid to the next.

Many people also wonder what happens to the energy as it climbs up the pyramid.

As an ecosystem moves, the energy at each trophic stage decreases. Only 10 percent of energy at each trophic level can be transferred to the next level. The rest is lost through metabolic processes such as heat.

What is the purpose of energy 90?

The energy is transferred from trophic to trophic levels and about 90% of it is lost. Some energy is lost as heat into the environment (an affect of respiration), and some is lost as incompletely digested foods (egesta).