The Tertiary consumers Are those that feed on secondary and primary consumers. For example, carnivores that feed on other carnivores.
This classification has its origin in what, in biology, is called a Food network , Which represents all the possible paths that energy and nutrients can take through an ecosystem, jumping from one organism to the next.
Each trajectory is a food chain, and contains several levels that separate different types of organisms. In that sense, a tertiary consumer is a level of a food chain. These p They may be omnivorous or carnivorous, which means that their diets may include plants or consist only of meat.
A good example of a tertiary consumer is a hawk, which can feed on secondary consumers such as snakes or primary consumers such as mice and birds. However, a predator at the top of the chain, like a mountain lion, is still at a level higher than the hawk.
When an organism dies, it is finally eaten by predators (such as vultures, worms and crabs) and broken down by decomposers (mostly bacteria and fungi). After this process, the energy exchange is still going on.
The position of some organisms in the food chain may vary, as their diet also differs. For example, when a bear eats berries, it is functioning as a primary consumer, but When it eats a herbivorous rodent, it becomes a secondary consumer. Finally when the bear eats salmon, it is a tertiary consumer.
Number of tertiary consumers compared to other levels
Tertiary consumers make up the smallest group within the food pyramid. This is so to keep the balance in the flow of energy, which you can see later. That is, the tertiary consumers are those who consume the most energy and those who produce less, so your group should be smaller.
In any food web, energy is lost every time an organism eats another. Because of this, there must be many more plants than consumers of plants. There are more autotrophs than heterotrophs, and more plant consumers than meat.
Although there is intense competition between animals, there is also interdependence. When a species is extinguished, it can affect a whole chain of species and have unpredictable consequences.
As the number of carnivores in a community increases, they eat more and more herbivores, and so the herbivorous population declines. It then becomes more difficult for carnivores to find herbivores than to eat, and the carnivorous population in turn decreases.
In this way, carnivores and herbivores are maintained in a relatively stable equilibrium, each limiting the population of the other. There is a similar balance between plants and plant-eaters.
Energy needed by tertiary consumers
The organisms considered as tertiary consumers require a great amount of energy to be able to nourish themselves and to develop normally their vital functions. This is due to the way in which the flow of energy between trophic levels occurs.
Almost all the energy that drives ecosystems comes ultimately from the sun. The solar energy , Which is an abiotic factor, enters the ecosystem through the process of photosynthesis . The organisms in an ecosystem that capture the electromagnetic energy of the sun and convert it into chemical energy are called producers.
Producers produce the carbon-based molecules, usually carbohydrates, that are consumed by the rest of the organisms in the ecosystem, including humans. These include all green plants, and some bacteria and algae. Every living being on Earth literally owes its life to the producers.
After a producer captures the energy of the sun and has used it to grow plants, other organisms arrive and gobble it up. These primary consumers, as they are called, feed exclusively on producers. If these consumers are human, we call them Vegetarians . Otherwise, they are known as herbivores.
Primary consumers only get a fraction of the total solar energy, about 10% captured by the producers they eat. The other 90% is used by the grower for growth, reproduction and survival, or lost as heat.
Primary consumers are consumed by secondary consumers. An example would be the birds that eat insects that eat leaves. Secondary consumers are eaten by tertiary consumers. Cats that eat birds eating insects that eat leaves, for example.
At each level, called the trophic level, about 90% of energy is lost. So, if a plant captures 1000 calories of solar energy, an insect that eats the plant will only get 100 calories of energy.
A chicken will only get 10 calories, and a human who eats chicken will only get 1 calorie of the original 1000 calories of the solar energy captured by the plant.
Relationships between producers, primary consumers, secondary consumers and tertiary consumers are usually drawn as a pyramid, known as the energy pyramid, with producers at the bottom and tertiary consumers at the top.
Many producers are needed so that consumers at higher trophic levels, such as humans, get the energy they need to grow and reproduce. Based on this, it can be said that the tertiary consumers are the ones that need the most energy.
This is the answer to the great mystery of why there are so many plants on Earth: because the flow of energy through ecosystems is inefficient. Only 10% of the energy at one trophic level is passed to the next.
References
- Pyramid of Energy in Ecology (s.f.). Recovered from kean.edu.
- The ecosystem: an inter-acting community (s.f.). The Open Door Web Site. Recovered from saburchill.com.
- Food Chain and Food Web (s.f.). Retrieved from ducksters.com.
- Energy: Food Chains (November 2013). Retrieved from mrfranta.org.
- Tertiary Consumers and Pelicans. (S.f.). Welcome To The Marine Biome!!! Retrieved from marinebiome2.weebly.com.