Pyramids of biomass
Biomass
The dry mass of an organism. is living or recently dead tissues. The mass of your body is biomass because you are alive. Wood is considered biomass because it was recently a plant. Fossil fuels are not considered biomass because they are the remains of organisms that died millions of years ago and have been chemically changed from the original living tissue.
Pyramids of biomass
We can measure the amount of biomass at different The position of an organism in a food chain, food web or pyramid. in a food chain. The total biomass of each trophic level is often represented as a modified bar chart called a pyramid of biomass. In a A sequence (usually shown as a diagram) of feeding relationships between organisms, showing which organisms eat what and the movement of energy through trophic levels. from a healthy The living organisms in a particular area, together with the non-living components of the environment. the biomass at each trophic level must reduce. An example of a food chain is:
clover → snail → thrush → sparrowhawks
So in an ecosystem the clover has more biomass than all the snails, which have more biomas than all the thrushes and so on. We say that pyramids of biomass are always perfectly shaped. If this is not the case, then the ecosystem is likely to be unhealthy and in danger.
Pyramids of biomass must be drawn with the:
- bars equally spaced around the midpoint
- bars touching
- bar for the Plants that begin food chains by making energy from carbon dioxide and water. at the bottom
- length of each bar is proportional to the amount of biomass available at each trophic level