Which part of the living system did you change?
Labs / Biology
Energy Pyramid
Sunlight feeds the plants, plants feed the grazers, and grazers feed the predators — but only about a tenth of the energy survives each step upward. Tap a species to wipe it out, drag between two levels to add a feeding link, or click a link to cut it, and watch the shrinking pyramid and the cascade of crashes.
Labs / Biology / Energy Pyramid
Energy Pyramid
Sunlight feeds the plants, plants feed the grazers, and grazers feed the predators — but only about a tenth of the energy survives each step upward. Tap a species to wipe it out, drag between two levels to add a feeding link, or click a link to cut it, and watch the shrinking pyramid and the cascade of crashes.
Why it matters
Why explore this?
Living systems are connected and constantly changing. This model makes one biological process visible so you can test how its parts affect one another.
Explore
Try the model
Producers 20,000Herbivores 2,000Predators 200Transfer 10%Crashed none
Investigate
Questions to test
Predict first, try it in the model, then use what you observe to answer.
What to try
- The pyramid loses roughly 90% of its energy at every level. Why can the meadow feed so many grasshoppers but only a handful of hawks?
- Remove the rabbit — the food source at the center of the web. Which predators starve, and which survive on other prey?
- Slide transfer efficiency from 5% up to 25%. How much does the predator level grow when each meal delivers more usable energy?
- Cut every link leading to a single producer. Does the energy it captured just vanish from the ecosystem?
- Switch from grassland to wetland. Does more incoming sunlight change the shape of the pyramid, or only the numbers on it?
Explain
Make sense of what happened
Explain the process as a chain: a change happens, the system responds, and that response affects what happens next. Use an observation from the model as evidence.
Check
Before you leave
How did the system respond?
How would you explain that response?
If you can answer all three using evidence from the model, you understand the main idea. If not, return to Explore and change one setting at a time.