SciHawks

We then discussed competition among species that occupy similar niches (food source, habitat, resources used) in an ecosystem as seen in the Finch chart from our lab on natural selection/speciation of finches.
We reviewed the reason for biomass and energy pyramids for the various levels of organisms from producers through tertiary consumers:Going from producer level to primary consumer level and beyond, the total energy of each subsequent level decreases due to the fact that 90% of the energy consumed is lost/released as heat so only 10% can be stored as potential energy in the molecules that makeup the organisms in a given level.