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no cabeçalho, pintura de Paul Béliveau
Photograph by CHRISTOPHE KICIAK
Photosynthesis is unbelievable. The entire food chain is just creatures stealing energy from other creatures—sometimes it’s an animal eating a plant or another animal, sometimes it’s calmer, like a bee stealing a flower’s nectar. But we rarely stop to ask, “How did all that energy find its way into the food chain in the first place?” With photosynthesis, of course. Plants figured out how to turn the sun’s energy into “food,” and this is the origin of all the energy throughout the food chain. Photosynthesis is the key moment when natural energy enters the world of biology—I don’t think about this enough.
[Reader David B. points out that there's another way energy gets into the food chain: "Deep below the surface of the ocean are thermal vents where entire ecosystems live off the process we call chemosynthesis. There, chemoautotrophs drive the food web using inorganic sources of energy such as hydrogen sulfide."]
do blog, 'Wait But Why'
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