![[option 1] image for](../media/res/animal-land.svg)
Hungry, hungry honey badger gonna eat you and run!
Continue up the FOOD CHAIN.
To live and grow, animals need to consume food full of carbon. They get it by eating parts of plants or other animals. Omnivores, like humans and honey badgers, eat both. We live on the energy we get from digesting, burning the sugars that are rich in carbon. We also build our bodies from the carbon we consume. All the carbon the badger is made from comes into the food web through photosynthesis in plants.
Carbon moves through many life-forms in a food chain. Carbon stored as fructose in an apple may be eaten by a worm, then picked out by a bird, then chased down by a hungry honey badger.
BEGIN AS: Plant Biomass. BECOME: Animal Biomass.
Heterotrophic organisms ingest other organisms as sources of energy in the food web.
Autotroph means self-feeding.
Learn much more with Wikipedia: Food_web, Eating, Metabolism
![[option 2] image for](../media/res/soil.svg)
Loosen up. Join our brown, dirty and nutrient rich lifestyle. Break it down in the SOIL.
Go through the process of DECOMPOSITION.
Dead trees are food for microbes. After plants die, they decay. Bacteria and fungi act as decomposers, sustaining themselves by breaking down complex carbon compounds into simpler forms. Carbon stored in a leaf falls to the forest floor. As the structures and cells of the leaf get broken down bit by bit the carbon mixes into the soil—fertile soil that is more than 50% carbon!
BEGIN AS: Plant Biomass. BECOME: Soil Organic Matter.
C6H12O6 => 2 C2H5OH + 2 C02
Sugar => Ethanol + Carbon Dioxide
Complex organic molecules are reduced to simpler forms in the process of decomposition.
Learn much more with Wikipedia: Plant_decomposition, Organic_matter
You are Carbon in a Plant
We really are the stuff of life! Carbon in a tree? Nowhere I’d rather be.
Plants are factories that transform carbon dioxide into the raw materials to power and grow life on earth. They are called "primary producers" because they are at the beginning of the food web. "Consumers" eat plants and then burn the plant sugar for their own energy. Sugar also acts as the building blocks for more and more complex organic molecules. It's in cellulose, the bark, the DNA. The carbon essential for life enters the food chain through plants.
A body built of carbon can be burned to release heat energy, perhaps to roast a marshmallow. All the carbon it held would be released into the atmosphere or deposited in the soil ... and no longer fixing carbon.
[EQUATION?]
Learn much more with Wikipedia: Plant
