Pyramids of Biomass Flashcards

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What does biomass mean in a food chain?

Biomass is the total mass of living material in organisms, usually measured as dry mass.

A pyramid of biomass is a bar chart that shows the biomass at each trophic level in a food chain.

Producers, such as plants, are at the bottom because they have the greatest biomass.

The pyramid gets narrower because biomass decreases at each level as not all food is eaten or turned into new body mass.

Biomass is often measured in grams or kilograms per square metre, written as g/m² or kg/m².

They use dry mass because the amount of water in organisms can change and would make wet mass results unreliable.

You can find the average dry mass of one organism, multiply by how many there are, and use this to estimate total biomass.

A pyramid of biomass shows the mass of organisms at each level, while a pyramid of numbers only shows how many organisms there are.

It is usually a true pyramid shape because the total biomass almost always decreases at each higher trophic level.

It shows that top predators have a small total biomass compared with organisms at lower trophic levels.