What is a food chain and how does energy move through it?
Sunshine's Long Straw
What is a food chain and how does energy move through it?
Picture a meadow at breakfast time. The grass is eating sunlight, a grasshopper is eating the grass, a frog is eyeing the grasshopper, and somewhere a hawk is eyeing the frog. That's a food chain — a who-eats-whom line, where a meal becomes a meal becomes a meal. But here's the real secret it's carrying: it's not really moving food. It's moving energy.
Everything alive runs on energy, the same way a toy runs on a battery. You need it to breathe, to grow, to hop, to think. And almost every drop of that energy on Earth started in the exact same place — ninety-three million miles away.
