Is there more pesticide concentration in falcons or fish?

A

Afira T

New member
It's for my homework of sorts and I'm kinda stuck. Some people say falcons have more pesticide because the pesticide in the fishes gets into them when they eat the fish but other people say that fish have more because when the falcons eat the fish, only a small portion the energy the fish has is taken. I'm getting cross-eyed from all this.

And if you have the time, can you help me with these questions as well?
- What is the role of dead trees in the ecosystem?
- What is the role of bacteria and fungus in the ecosystem?
- Why is the carbon cycle so important to the environment?

You don't need to answer the other three questions if you don't have the time. I appreciate the help. Please and thank you =)
 
Prey animals of any sort are the top of the food chain...nothing regularly eats them.

Falcons really have no enemies. So they would contain the most insecticide

(and as an aside, we as well are top of the food chain, so any fish containing any poisions would get into us Mercury is a real problem for people. Read about the people in Japan who were regularly eating fish contaminated with mercury in a bay.... Minamata's Disease. When it was discovered why all these people were permanently gorked, the Japanese government began to restrict what companies could dump in public waters. There are always big issues about dumping insecticides and metals into areas that are public... that's what that film Erin Brochovich was all about. See it. Chromium dumped in water in California. )

Insecticides such as the now banned DDT are stored in fats. In the case of this one, it interrupted the birds' ability to produce eggs that had thick enough shells to withstand the incubation process... they were all breaking in the nests. The result was a hugely dropping predator bird population.

So, it is the falcon that has more of any insecticide or any heavy metal in its fatty tissue.

I'll help you with the first two, the last one you can google.

Dead trees form the basis of bacterial decay, and fungus and bacteria in turn help recycle the nutrients that the tree carried.... Those bacteria and fungi allow rot to occur. If there were none of them, by now old dead trees would be three miles high, all over this planet where they grew. And as well, nothing that died would every get those molecules back into some new organism. Life as we know it would stop. We all would be miles deep in dead stuff. And when animals die, the bacteria that helped them digest food, begins to digest the animal, making those molecules again available to future living things...

You are using recycled molecules. Every water molecule in your body has passed thru the kidneys of a whale. The proteins that are you once belonged to a cow, and that cow got it from grass. The grass made those molecules from the compounds of nitrogen in the ground, with the help of sunlight. No sunlight, no soil nutrients, no you.

Helpful?
 
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