Use theories to explain natural phenomena—the concept of energy flow explains the limited length of food chains.
Energy flow is governed through the laws of thermodynamics. The first law (and I’m paraphrasing) essentially says that energy cannot be created or destroyed but merely transformed from one form to another. The second law (the one about entropy) says that energy transfer is never 100% efficient and some energy is always lost as heat, which can not be regained or reused.
Therefore, in a food chain, light energy is transformed into chemical energy by producers and then into additional chemical forms as it passes through to consumers. As energy is being transformed at each trophic level, some of this energy is lost to the system (mostly as heat from respiration, but also in the form of undigested parts, excretion etc). Thus while the total energy remains the same as the amount put in by the sun, the amount that is actually available to consumers decreases with each increase in trophic level. We use the figure of 10-20% as a rough rule of thumb – that is, at each successive trophic level, only 10-20% of the energy from the previous level is available. So 10% of the energy in a producer is available to a primary consumer, but only 10% of this energy is available to a secondary consumer – 1% of the original energy in the producer. Thus the higher the trophic level, the less energy is available and the limited length of most food chains and why many organisms can function at multiple trophic levels.
