Talk:Heterotroph
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Article Grading: The following comments were left by the quality and importance raters: (edit · history · refresh · how to use this template) Rated "top" as high school/SAT biology content and general concept of metabolism. - tameeria 05:02, 19 February 2007 (UTC) |
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This article is written with carbon in mind, whereas it could more sensibly focus on energy. Plants want carbon too, but take it in an "oxidised" form and reduce it through photosynthesis. Heterotrophs want reduced carbon.
Another point that might be worth making is that some animals (e.g. corals) engage in intimate symbioses that essentially make them behave as if they were autotrophs. The main difference is that, unlike most "plants", these animals don't fully incorporate their symbionts into their life-cycle - at each generation (or more frequently) they have to capture fresh ones. Dinoflagellates illustrate how this isn't necessarily a stark distinction - some species are fully heterotrophic, others fully autotrophic, some do both, and others capture symbionts in the same manner as corals.
Anyway, will perhaps get back to sort this out later unless anyone has any objections. --Plumbago 6 July 2005 11:47 (UTC)
[edit] biology?
> This ecology-related article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it
This article is about ecology? I'm surprised, because it looks to me like it's about biology.
- Ecology is the subfield of biology which is concerned with how organisms interact with their environment. From the ecology page:
Ecology, or ecological science, is the scientific study of the distribution and abundance of living organisms and how these properties are affected by interactions between the organisms and their environment.
- OK, to be fair the original intent of ecology was to study how organisms are distributed. But it turns out this has everything to do with interactions. What an organism eats (or doesn't) covers a significant part of its interactions with its environment and with other organisms.
- Jmeppley 06:55, 30 March 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Flowchart misleading
The flowchart for heterotrophs, autotrophs is misleading. I wrote this message to the author, but maybe in the meantime it should be removed?
Dear Pekaje,
the flow chart currently makes it look like something is an autotroph if is it NOT a photoautotroph or a chemoautotroph (similar with heterotroph), whereas an autotroph is really the supra category which includes photoautotrophs and chemoautotrophs.
Cheers,
Jujubeberry Jujubeberry 10:21, 22 October 2007 (UTC)
The flowchart is utterly wrong and should be removed. See discussion under the flowchart. At the same time:
"If it obtains nitrogen from organic compounds, but not energy, it will be deemed an autotroph."
I think it should be changed to nitrogen autotroph, since the most used meaning for autotrophy considers carbon autotrophy.
