Biotic Factors: Overview, Definition, Types, Examples, Topics

What are Biotic Factors?

An ecosystem's biotic components are its biological components. Any living creature present in an ecosystem can be thought of as a biotic component because of the way ecosystems function—as intricate networks of cooperation and competition where the actions of one life form can have an impact on all the others.

The types of creatures that can dwell in an ecosystem and their means of survival can all be significantly influenced by biotic variables, including soil bacteria, plant life, top predators, and pollution. What ecosystems look like and what ecological niches are available are determined by biotic factors as well as non-living abiotic ones, including temperature, sunshine, location, and chemistry.

Types of Biotic Factors

According to their roles in the energy flow that all living creatures in the ecosystem require to exist, biotic factors are divided by scientists into three main categories. These three categories are called autotrophs (producers), heterotrophs (consumers), and detritivores (decomposers).

1. Producers

Producers are organisms that produce their own food utilizing inorganic materials and energy sources. They are often referred to as autotrophs, from the Greek words "auto" for "self" and "trophy" for "food." Producers are crucial since life wouldn't be possible without them.

The very first life forms on Earth had to learn how to transform non-living substances into fuel and building blocks in order to create new cells. That's because there weren't any other living forms for the earliest life forms to eat when they first emerged. Therefore, the first living things had to be producers. As the only life forms capable of using inorganic energy as a source of life's fuel, producers are still essential.

There are two major classes of producers:

The majority of producers on Earth today are photoautotrophs. These farmers use solar energy to fuel their daily activities. Photoautotrophs include certain bacteria, green plants, and green algae. To capture photons from the Sun and gather their energy, the majority of photoautotrophs require a pigment like chlorophyll. After that, they transform the energy into a form that all living things use to build proteins, carbohydrates, lipids, and other vital components of life.

The base of the energy pyramid in most ecosystems is made up of plants, which are multicellular, extremely complex, and highly effective at converting sunlight into fuel for living things. The energy that plants obtain from the Sun is essential to the survival of all other species.

In most ecosystems, chemoautotrophs are quite infrequent. Chemicals that are uncommon in normal surroundings, like hydrogen, iron, and sulphur, provide them with energy. Despite this, they are nevertheless capable of contributing significantly to ecosystems due to their peculiar biochemistry.

Some chemoautotrophic methanogens, or microbes that produce methane, exist. The planet's temperature may be significantly influenced by methane, a greenhouse gas with a substantially greater warming potential than carbon dioxide. With their distinct metabolisms, other chemoautotrophs can generate compounds with comparable potency. The initial life on Earth may have been either chemoautotrophs or photoautotrophs, but this is unknown. The reason why photoautotrophs are more prevalent today may be due to the fact that sunlight is more accessible than the chemicals chemo autotrophs utilizes to generate their energy.

2. Consumers

Consumers also referred to as "heterotrophs," are organisms that consume other living things to produce energy. Their name derives from the Greek words "troph" for "meal" and "hetero" for "other." Heterotrophs include all herbivores, carnivores, and omnivores that consume both plants and animals.

When some creatures learned they could consume autotrophs as a source of energy rather than producing their own power and organic materials, heterotrophy most likely evolved. Some autotrophs later developed symbiotic connections with consumers, such as angiosperms and plants that attract animals by producing fruits and nectars, which the animals then use to aid in reproduction. The majority of levels in the energy pyramids of most ecosystems are occupied by consumers, such as herbivores, small predators, and top predators that consume other creatures.

3. Decomposers

Organisms known as decomposers, or detritivores, utilise the organic compounds produced by producers and consumed by consumers as a source of energy. They are crucial to ecosystems because they transform components from other living things into simpler ones so that other species can reuse them.

Decomposers are organisms that break down dead things or waste products from other life forms, such as soil bacteria, fungi, worms, and flies. Since consumers typically consume other organisms while they are still living, they are different from them.

On the other hand, decomposers break down waste materials like decaying fruit and dead animals that might not be of interest to customers. During the process, they convert these dead objects into simpler compounds that heterotrophs can use to flourish and generate more energy for the ecosystem as a whole.

Composting, in which waste scraps of plant and animal products are placed in a pile, and decomposers like bacteria, worms, and flies are allowed to flourish, is based on this idea. The composter's garden becomes bigger and healthier as a result of the decomposers' breakdown of the waste materials in the compost. These decomposers convert the waste materials into rich fertilizers in the garden.

The transition from the base to the higher levels of an ecosystem's energy pyramid is made possible by decomposers. Decomposers can transform the raw materials and energy that have been consumed by dead plants, herbivores, smaller carnivores, and even top carnivores into a form that can be used by the ecosystem's producers more easily to capture sunlight. The energy cycle of the biosphere is preserved in this way.

Examples of Biotic Factors

1. Cyanobacteria and Life on Earth

Cyanobacteria are thought to have been the first widely distributed type of life on Earth. These relatively primitive cells, which used sunlight to produce food and organic materials, were crucial in the development of all of Earth's current ecosystems. The existence of oxygen in the atmosphere on Earth was dependent on the success of cyanobacteria. The DNA-damaging ultraviolet radiation from our sun made it impossible or very difficult for any organisms to live on land, which also meant that aerobic respiration was not conceivable.

However, cyanobacteria discovered a way to capture the power of sunlight and store it in organic molecules. They had to convert carbon molecules from inorganic sources, like the carbon dioxide in the air, into carbon-based organic components like sugars, proteins, and lipids in order to accomplish this. In order to achieve this, cyanobacteria ingested the inorganic gas CO2 and then released a fresh gas, O2.

The most potent kind of heterotroph metabolism, aerobic respiration, turns out to be the optimal fuel and is made up of molecules of oxygen, or O2. Ozone (O3), a molecule also known as ozone, was created when molecules of O2 reacted with ultraviolet light in the high atmosphere. Ozone absorbs ultraviolet light in the upper atmosphere and makes it possible for life forms to colonize the land.

Cyanobacteria would be supplanted mainly by more advanced offspring like trees, grass, and algae which would take over its function as Earth's main oxygen generators in the billions of years to come. But cyanobacteria still show up in blooms, which are occasionally visible from space. All of the ecosystems on Earth received oxygen as a result of cyanobacteria and its contemporary descendants serving as biotic agents.

2. Humans

Anthropocene was chosen as the name for the next geologic period by biologists from all around the world. The words "anthropoid" and "cene," which in Greek imply "new" or "recent," are combined to form the name "Anthropocene”. The consequences of human technology, which have significantly altered the world ecosystem and are comparable to those of past catastrophic climate change events and even asteroid strikes, define this period.

With the burning of wood, coal, and oil releasing millions of years' worth of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere in the span of just a few centuries, human activity has significantly altered the Earth's carbon cycle. About half of all forests on Earth have been destroyed by humans over the same period of time. These forests once served to absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and re-incorporate it into plant life. Additionally, a lot of new compounds that do not occur in nature, such as plastics, heavy metals, and radioactive materials, have started to be released by people into the land, the air, and the oceans of the planet.

The outcome has been the start of an alarmingly rapid climate shift and mass extinction, in which species are vanishing more quickly than they have in the 65 million years since the asteroid strike that wiped out the dinosaurs and paved the way for the emergence of mammals. Therefore, after cyanobacteria, humans may be the most potent illustration of how living elements in an environment may alter it. For their own nourishment, humans are dependent on the intricate ecological interactions of many other species.

Scientists are already beginning to sound the alarm that new chemicals that people have released into the environment appear to be killing out the pollinators that many crops used for human sustenance depend on. Climate change brought on by the carbon dioxide people have produced into the atmosphere has caused severe drought in many locations with dense human populations that need significant amounts of food to exist, posing a threat to human food crops as well. Humans need to understand the ecosystems on which they depend for their existence and well-being as the dominant species on Earth.