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Grade 5 · lesson 1 of 4

Trace Energy in a Food Chain

Explain where food-chain energy begins and distinguish energy flow from recycling.

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Supplied materials

  • Paper and a pencil, or say your answers aloud.

Learn the idea

Plants use light energy to make energy-rich food. When an animal eats a plant, some of that food’s stored energy can support the animal’s activities. An animal that eats another animal can receive energy stored in its food.

For our simplified model, the pathway is sunlight → grass → rabbit → fox. Arrows mean energy is transferred in that direction. Energy does not all stay available to the next organism: organisms use energy, and some is transferred to the surroundings as thermal energy. This energy pathway is different from the recycling of matter.

  1. Draw the four named parts in order.
  2. Label the first arrow sunlight used by grass to make food.
  3. Label the next arrows food energy transferred by eating.
  4. Add outward arrows labeled thermal energy to show why not all energy reaches the next step.
Worked example

See the method in action

In a second model, sunlight → bean plant → caterpillar → bird, the sunlight supplies energy to the plant, and feeding transfers some stored food energy to the animals.

Your turn

Check your reasoning

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In the grass → rabbit → fox model, where did the energy stored in the grass’s food originally come from?

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See the answer and explanation

from sunlight used by the grass

Grass uses sunlight to make energy-rich food. Feeding can transfer some of this stored energy to the rabbit and then to the fox. The model does not say energy is created by an animal or endlessly recycled.

Take it further

Remove rabbits from the model on paper. Explain why this diagram no longer shows that feeding route to the fox; it does not prove a real fox has no other food source, because real food webs have more connections.

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These LifeStarter passages, scenarios and exercises are authored for this Academy with AI assistance and review. External resources keep their publishers’ terms. A grade label suggests a starting level; it does not establish alignment with your school’s complete requirements.