Energy flow (ecology)

Energy flow in ecology is like a game of hot potato.

You know how when you play hot potato, you pass around a hot or warm potato to other players so that you don't get burned? In energy flow, the “potato” is energy, and the players are the organisms in an ecosystem.

The sun is the source of almost all the energy that drives life on earth. Plants use sunlight to make their own food through a process called photosynthesis, turning the sun's energy into food energy (think of it as the potato getting warm).

Animals eat the plants, and when they do, they are getting the energy that the plants stored from the sun, and they turn that into energy they can use for movement and growth (think of it as them catching the potato before it gets too hot and using it to fuel their bodies).

But as the potato gets passed around, not all of it is caught. Some of it is lost between the hands of one player to the next (think of it as the potato dropping and not getting caught).

Similarly, not all the energy in the food an animal eats will be used by that animal. Some of the energy is lost as heat when the animal moves or grows, or it might pass out of the animal's body as waste like poop or sweat.

This means that not all the energy from the sun gets used up by organisms in an ecosystem. Some of it is always lost along the way.

In the end, the energy that is not used by one organism can be passed on to another organism. This is how predators can eat prey, and bigger predators can eat smaller predators.

So, in short, energy flow in ecology is like a game of hot potato where the players are the organisms in an ecosystem, and the potato is the energy passed from one organism to another, but not all of the energy is caught or used along the way.