Energy Pyramid Levels
The bottom level of the energy pyramid
What is a producer?
A hawk eats a snake. Who is the predator?
What is the hawk?
Mushroom
What is a decomposer?
Which direction does energy flow in a food chain?
From the sun to producers to consumers.
True or False: In a food web, arrows point to what eats something.
False (they point to what gets the energy).
The kind of consumer that only eats plants.
What is a herbivore?
In a pond food chain, a frog eats an insect. What did the insect eat?
What is a plant or algae?
Grass
Producer
What energy source starts most food chains?
What is the sun?
Fix this: “The rabbit eats the fox.”
The fox eats the rabbit.
The trophic level that comes after secondary consumer.
What are tertiary consumers?
What do you call an animal that gets eaten?
What is prey?
Lion
Consumer
What percent of energy is passed to the next level in an energy pyramid?
What is 10%?
If you remove one animal from a food web, what might happen?
It could cause an imbalance or collapse in the food web.
Why do energy pyramids get smaller at the top?
Because energy decreases at each level.
A fox eats a rabbit, and the rabbit eats grass. What level is the rabbit?
What is a primary consumer?
What do decomposers do in a food web?
Breaks down dead organisms and return nutrients to the soill.
What happens to the other 90% of energy?
It’s used for life processes or "lost" to the environment.
Why are food webs better models than food chains?
They show many feeding relationships instead of just one.
Name all four main levels of an energy pyramid in order.
What are producers, primary consumers, secondary consumers, tertiary consumers?
Create a 4-organism food chain that includes a snake.
Example: grass → mouse → snake → hawk.
Answers will vary.
Name one example of each: a producer, a consumer, and a decomposer
Example: grass, deer, fungi.
Answers will vary.
How would removing producers affect the whole pyramid?
All levels above would collapse because energy starts with producers.
A plant is shown getting energy from a rabbit. What's wrong?
Plants don’t get energy from animals; they make their own from sunlight.