Introduction
Energy is the ability to do work and cannot be created or destroyed but can be transferred or transformed. We get a lot of our energy from food.
Flow of Energy
As a human, I am a third consumer in this picture. My personal energy can be traced back to the foods I’ve eaten. I get energy from eating vegetables and meat, then store energy to use for everyday activities. When I burn energy, it can be released as heat, kinetic energy, or potential energy.
Eating plants would require less energy than eating animals. Plants are grown easily and take less preparation; whereas animals require fattening, more preparation from slaughtering, treatment procedures, and they also take longer to cook. Eating animals could potentially strain the ecosystem because we producing more secondary/tertiary consumers; more livestock would mean more consumption of other beings. This would create an unbalance in the ecosystem because we are increasing one factor (secondary) and not the others. Preys reproduce based on the current need of our ecosystem, increasing predators would potentially strain the ecosystem overtime.
Types of Energy
Potential EnergyPotential energy is energy that is stored, waiting to be used. The tennis ball in the picture has potential energy because it has the potential to slide down the slope when pushed by wind or living beings.
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Kinetic EnergyOnce it is in motion and rolling down into the pond, its potential energy would become kinetic energy, which is energy of what is happening.
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Nuclear EnergyThe sun is the greatest example of nuclear energy. Energy on Earth is essentially originated from the sun; through the fusion reaction in the sun, it is able to provide the planet with all of the energy it needs to sustain life.
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Chemical EnergyChemical energy is energy stored in the bonds in chemical compounds. For example, plants harness energy from sunlight through the process of photosynthesis. Energy from the sun would then be transformed into chemical energy for plants to grow.
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Calories & Energy
Calories is the unit of energy.
4-9-4 Rule
In foods, it is how much energy your body could get from eating or drinking it. When looking at foods, on average the 4-9-4 rule can be applied. 4-9-4, means that carbohydrates will give you 4 cal/g, fats give you 9 cal/gram, and proteins give you 4 cal/g. You can try this rule by looking at a food label in your house and estimate the number of calories. Did the label agrees with you? How close was your estimate? What do you think could have caused the difference?
Arizona
I used a bottle of Arizona to test the 4-9-4 rule. My estimate was 54 calories, which was 4g more than what the label claimed; 14g of carbs(4 cal/g) + 0g protein + 0g fat. Calculating processed food may differ from unprocessed food when applying the 4-9-4 rune because some companies tend to ignore the costs of the digestive process, such as losses to bacteria and energy spent digesting. This may explain the underestimate for processed food in this bottle of Arizona.
Zero Calories
Do you like diet drinks? Zero calories? Let's looks at how these drinks are actually worst for your body than what commercials want you to think. Before I share my experience with you, go to your local convenience store and try and find a zero calorie energy drink and analyze the label with the 4-9-4 rule. After you have analyzed the labels, what do you think it means to have an energy drink that has zero calories? Now look at companies like Gatorade, how does their philosophical approach to energy differ from the others?
Gatorade & Xyience
In my own experience, I went to Meijer and found two drink products that claim to be zero calories, Gatorade and Xyience. Usually, an energy drink is considered to be zero calories when it has zero fat, protein, and carbs; zero sugar. Companies like Gatorade's philosophy differ from others because they advertise zero calories products that gives consumers energy from vitamins and electrolytes.
Burning Calories
Here is a fun exercise to understand calories better. Fill in the document below with an estimate of calories burned for each activity and check your estimate using a web browser.
Your browser does not support viewing this document. Click here to download the document.
After you've done the activity sheet what did you learn about the calories you burn? Did anything surprise you?
I learned that you still burn calories no matter what you’re doing, even at rest. What surprised me most were the calories burned while grocery shopping, playing cards, and sleeping. I didn’t think that you would even burn calories while sleeping or that by just playing cards can burn so much calories. As for grocery shopping, I do it all the time and never thought I’ve been burning 202 calories/ per hour.
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Related Experience Entries
Cellular Respiration vs. Respiration
Cellular Respiration Diagram
Respiration vs. Cellular Respiration Diagram
The Origin of Energy on the Planet
Let's look at an example of a bowling bowl on top of a ladder and trace its origin.
Photosynthesis
Input: Sunlight + Water + Carbon Dioxide --> Output: Oxygen + Glucose
Compare and Contrast Map of Photosynthesis and Respiration
Related Experience Entries
Left-Overs
Plants are significant to our ecosystem and contribute to sustaining life on Earth. Plants' left-overs is the difference between the energy plants make and the energy that they use is what supports all other life. These left‐overs are essential in helping to structure the relationships between different animals as it spreads throughout the ecosystem. Plants and animals are categorized based on where they get their food. Producers are any organism that can produce its own food and animals that require energy for survival are considered consumer. Animals are generally placed into one of several categories depending upon what they eat: first order consumers eat plants; second order consumers tend to eat first order consumers; third order consumers tend to eat second order consumers.
Example:
Plant (Producer)– because they make their own food from the sun
Grasshopper (First order consumer)– because they eat plants
Bird (Second order consumer)– because they eat grasshoppers
Fox (Third order consumer)– because they eat birds
Example:
Plant (Producer)– because they make their own food from the sun
Grasshopper (First order consumer)– because they eat plants
Bird (Second order consumer)– because they eat grasshoppers
Fox (Third order consumer)– because they eat birds
Model Ecosystem
http://www.mhhe.com/biosci/genbio/virtual_labs/BL_02/BL_02.html
To grasp a better understanding of how energy is cycled within our ecosystems, use the link above to place different organisms in the correct trophic level.
To grasp a better understanding of how energy is cycled within our ecosystems, use the link above to place different organisms in the correct trophic level.
- What patterns do you notice with respect to the number of individual organisms in each level?
- Why do you think this is the case?
- Now repeat the same process with “Antarctic Ocean Shore” and “Hot Desert.” Compare and contrast the distribution of organisms for these two ecosystems.
- What additional patterns do you notice?
my experience.
In the forest ecosystem, I noticed some patterns with the organism of each level. All plants were producers, all first order heterotrophs were herbivores, all second order consumers were smaller animals, and third order consumers were big carnivores/ omnivores. Plants were at the bottom because they had no mobility and couldn't defend themselves from predators. The size of the animals grew larger from bottom to top; smaller animals were prey to larger animals. The preyed organisms had more offspring than that of second and third consumers because overtime they came to realized that their offspring were killed rapidly and in order to continue the cycle, they had to produce more than their predators. For example, lions and humans are top predators and tend to have less offspring; they aren’t being hunted so there isn’t a need to reproduce as rapidly. As for Antarctic Ocean Shore and Hot Desert, there were similar in most ways. Both had plants at the bottom, herbivores as first consumers and big carnivore at the very top. The difference was that Antarctic Ocean Shore had solely one type of producer where as Hot Desert had a variety. Also, AOS had less variety in other types of animals than Hot Desert; since the Ocean is dominantly populated by fishes. The pattern in both ecosystem placed smaller built organisms at the bottom and larger built organisms at the top.
Energy Accounting
Everything you eat does not mean that you can use it for energy; materials that were unable to breakdown for energy. Let's look at your next meal, what were the basic ingredients for that meal? Browse the web to see what those main ingredients look like in the wild to understand what it looked like unprocessed. Did you eat 100% of the unprocessed ingredients? Why or why didn’t you?
Fish Sticks
I recorded my dinner of fish sticks and found the main ingredients to be minced Pollock, wheat flour, cotton seed oil, and soybean oil. From the pictures I browsed, I did not eat 100% of the unprocessed ingredients, because there are parts of the unprocessed food that are not edible, such as fish bones or leaves. For the oils used in fish sticks, during the process, oil was extracted from the leaves of plants and the other parts and became waste.
Thinking Exercise
Think about a 1000-pound cow, when slaughtered, it will yield about half a million calories. Cows consume roughly 5,000 calories a day and live to be 2 years before they are slaughtered; about 3.5 million calories minimum are invested into a cow before it can yield half a million calories.
How might you account for this difference between what goes in and what comes out?
More calories are invested in cows than what they yield because not all of the calories that they consumed daily will be stored. During the years before they are slaughtered, they have to burn calories daily to stay alive.
If a cow actually takes in 100 calories, why might only 80 of those calories be available the next day? And only 60 the following day?
Less calories are available the days after intake because calories are burned throughout the day prior for energy to function and live.
How might you account for this difference between what goes in and what comes out?
More calories are invested in cows than what they yield because not all of the calories that they consumed daily will be stored. During the years before they are slaughtered, they have to burn calories daily to stay alive.
If a cow actually takes in 100 calories, why might only 80 of those calories be available the next day? And only 60 the following day?
Less calories are available the days after intake because calories are burned throughout the day prior for energy to function and live.