I need help with a question about energy transfers in the environment?
The question is: grass contains 200 calories of energy, an antelope eats the grass, then a lion eats the antelope. How many calories will it receive?
The question is: grass contains 200 calories of energy, an antelope eats the grass, then a lion eats the antelope. How many calories will it receive?
Anonymous
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Badly phrased question.
The answer your teacher wants is
"About 2 calories from that bit of grass. The grass had 200 calories; the antelope got 20 calories, the lion got 2."
The idea here is that each trophic level can get only about 10% of the energy that was present in the trophic level below it. (This is kind of a silly generalization since the numbers will be way different for an energy pyramid with warm-blooded consumers as opposed to a pyramid with cold-blooded consumers -- just such a difference was used by one researcher to support the idea that dinosaurs were warm-blooded).
Why this is badly phrased: The lion eats plenty of antelope meat and gets all the calories he wants. Come to that, the antelope eats plenty of grass.
?
Not economically viable. In a few methods, you're describing the method we have already got with the solar -- a significant nuclear fusion reactor pouring out huge amounts of electromagnetic radiation in all instructional materials. A significant fission plant would generate colossal quantites of electric vigour by means of using mills, however then how do you get that vigour from the moon throughout practically ¼ million miles to the earth? What you'll desire to do is attention that vigour by some means instantly on the Earth, wherein we would seize and distribute it all over the world. Can't run a quite enormous cord, regardless that, when you consider that the Earth's rotation and the moon's orbit don't coincide, so you'll must ship it by means of a few style of electromagnetic radiation. That method you'll must have a few indescribably significant transmitting and receiving antennae to switch that vigour around the hole. And there'd be a significant lack of vigour around the hole, too (a approach good identified on this planet as "transmission losses"). Right now, we would do readily the identical factor with sun vigour -- if we had been inclined to hide practically the whole planet with sun panels to seize the daylight to transform it into electrical energy. But what occurs on a cloudy day? And if the entire arable land is included with sun panels, how will we develop meals? What approximately the various ecological influences of the sort of significant sun electrical energy method? Solar vigour isn't a principal supply of vigour at the Earth for the ones very explanations -- it is simply no longer economically viable to meet the vigour necessities of the arena with out different, devastating part-results. And we don't have any capacity to construct even a micro-variation of a fusion plant but, so we might must construct a fission plant, that is a ways much less effective. So, whilst it makes for a high-quality daydream, and a few well sci-fi reviews, surely, we are nowhere close virtually the capacity to do some thing like what you propose.