Discuss how the carbon cycle functions
What will be an ideal response?
The carbon cycle encompasses the two food chains on Earth. The regular food chain takes
place above the ground and involves life forms, mainly plants, that manufacture their own food
(primary producers) and form the base of the food chain. Creatures (primary consumers) eat the plants.
Predators are secondary consumers that eat other creatures. Carbon and energy move up the food chain
from plants to animals. However, if the food chain contained only producers and consumers, the chain
would collapse because all the world's carbon would be fixed in the bodies of dead life.
However, another type of food chain breaks down and recycles dead organisms—the detrital
food chain. Detritus is dead organisms or their products (crop residues, fallen leaves, animal wastes).
When it enters the soil, it is soil organic matter. Decay organisms in the soil (decomposers) consume
organic matter as a food source, returning most of the carbon to the atmosphere as carbon dioxide
through respiration and leaving behind a residue called humus. In the process, plant nutrients are
released that were tied up in the bodies of plants and animals.
At the heart of both food chains is a plant process called photosynthesis by which plants take
in carbon dioxide in the air and change it to organic carbon, the building block of living tissue.
Photosynthesis also converts solar energy to chemical energy and stores it in plants as sugars and other
energy-rich compounds.
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