when a consumer eats a producer, 10 percent of the producers's energy is passed on to the consumer trophic level. what happens to the other 90 percent?
The other 90 percent of the producer's energy is typically lost as heat during the process of metabolism and cellular respiration. It is not efficiently transferred or converted to the next trophic level. This loss is known as the 10% rule, which states that only about 10 percent of energy is transferred between trophic levels as organisms consume one another in a food chain or food web.
