Bio Pyramid

In the ongoing power debate, biomass power is getting a lot of play among politicians. To understand the concept, it first helps to understand the bio pyramid.

Bio Pyramid

The Food Pyramid

All of the organisms in the world ensue orders of classification. Either you choose to put them into groups of plants and animals, herbivores and carnivores, or any other of the many separate types of classification systems, organisms can be put into many groups in order to understand their relationship to one another. One way to classify organisms is to put them into their order, or hierarchy, in the food chain. In this way, we can see how animals and other organisms present to each other based on what they consume.

There are several separate ways to look at the food chain, and one foremost and useful tool in this area is the bio pyramid. A bio pyramid is a graphical chart that shows the comparative mass of the consumers to the producers in the food chain. This can be helpful in determining how power is transferred to the top levels of the pyramid from the lowest levels.

Each level in a bio pyramid is composed of a trophic level. Trophic levels are groupings of separate "consumer" groups, such as former 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 power produced, a bio pyramid shows them in order of total mass from highest to lowest. This often means that the former consumers, such as the plants, are at the lowest because they are more numerous and take up more mass. The levels are built upon then by how many upper level organisms could survive based on the level 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, the 5th, would only be able to have 100 kg of shark supported by the levels below.

In this way, a bio pyramid shows the inefficiency of the food chain, and lets researchers know that if a level was able to be skipped (such as a shark dipping down and eating shrimp instead of fish), more power would be conserved and the food chain would lose less power along the way. Given this fact, a bio pyramid is an foremost tool when looking at the laws of conservation of power among separate classes of organisms.

Bio Pyramid