I’ve come upon this question on a test today and answered “decomposers”. I was then told that the final consumer was the right answer. I don’t understand since what eats those final consumers are the decomposers when they die so in my mind I think they would get least amount of energy from producers. I am confused.
In: Biology
Maybe it’s about efficiency. Like, consider humans, around 20-30% of what we eat turns to poop. So that means there’s a lot of energy wastage. In contrast, plants take in sunlight, carbon dioxide, and other nutrients from the soil and fashion it into energy through their bodies, and their waste is just oxygen, carbon dioxide, and water.
It’s in your title. It’s a chain. It literally linear.
You need to learn where a mushroom and scavengers sit on that line.
Because decomposers don’t just get energy from the bottom of the chain, they get it from everyone, coz every organism produces waste, and the decomposers repurpose that waste, so the decomposers get way more energy supply from the elephant poo then the ants gets from the bottom of the chain
Decomposers, as a class, also eat all the other levels of the food chain. They also eat the excreted wastes that represent some of that level-to-level decrease in available energy.
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