Pyramid of biomass (Edexcel GCSE Biology): Revision Notes
📚 Revision Notes
Pyramid of biomass
infoNote
Pyramids of biomass represent the relative amount of biomass (the total mass of living material) at each trophic level in a food chain.
- Structure: The pyramid shape illustrates that there is less biomass as you move up the trophic levels.
- Energy Loss: Not all the food consumed by an organism is converted into biomass. This means the biomass at each level decreases because energy is lost at each stage.
Key Concepts:
- Producers (e.g., plants and algae) convert only about 1% of the sunlight they receive into biomass via photosynthesis. This is because not all sunlight reaches the photosynthesising parts of the plant (like leaves).
- Biomass Transfer: On average, only 10% of the biomass at each trophic level is transferred to the next level. The remaining 90% is lost through various processes.
Biomass- store of energy
When you go up the trophic levels:
Mass of organism goes down
As most of the biomass (or energy) is lost so does not become biomass until the next level up
