Any math lovers out there?
! Ok… I’m not looking for answers here… I am hoping someone can tell me how to figure these 2 questions out. For the first one, I came up with 10 hectares and 80 zebras but I’m worried I did it wrong. The second question, I am lost. PLEASE help me out! I’m pretty smart but, for some reason, when it comes to numbers… that part of my brain shrivels up lol.
Thank you for taking the time to check out my post…
1. Assume an African lion that weighs 10 kg at weaning grows to 161 kg in one year feeding exclusively on zebras that have an average weight of 187 kg. Both the lion and the zebra have a 10% efficiency of converting their food to flesh. The habitat these animals occupy produces 500 kg of zebra forage per hectare per year.
(a) Calculate how many hectares of zebra forage was needed to produce that 150 kg of lion?
(b) To the nearest whole number how many 187 kg equivalent zebras did that lion cub have to eat to gain that 150 kg?
2. Antarctica, which doesn’t even appear on many world maps, is the fifth largest continent, larger than either Europe or Australia, yet there are no land mammals because of the food that enters the food chain there, only 0.04% comes from organisms on the land or ice. Thus 99.96% comes from the sea. Production of food in the Southern Ocean, by mostly photosynthesis diatoms, is about 0.2 grams of carbohydrate per square meter of the oceans surface per day (or 650 million tonnes during the six months of daylight). These diatoms are eaten by tintinnids, copepods, foraminifera, radiolarians and young krill, but these krill take 5 years to mature and may live 7-8 years as adults so they too are far less than 10% efficient in converting food to flesh. In fact, their efficiency is about 5%. Baleen whales, squid, fish, crab eater seals and penguins (that are about 8% efficient in converting food to flesh) consume the krill. Members of this group are eaten in turn by elephant seals, orcas, Weddell seals, petrels and leopard seals that are 5% efficient. Now, if humans were to live in Antarctica and depend on this last group for their food and harvest 10% of the population each year, there would be about 1000 tonnes of available food to harvest. In Antarctica, each human needs about 1.5 kg of food each day. Calculate about how many people could be sustained in all of Antarctica based upon the figures given and assuming no food is imported.
People = __________
This closed post was written 2 years, 4 months ago | V/U/S: 244, 3, 0 | Edit Post | Report Post
Reciprocity (0) 
Since writing this post PluckyDog may have helped people, but has not within the last 4 days. PluckyDog is a verified member, has been around for 2 years, 4 months and has 7 posts and 138 replies to their name.
Replies (3)
Where were you?
You can also watch events on Help.com as they happen
PluckyDog changed the tags on this post: they were "Human, Antarctica, food, Lion, number, Krill, ocean, Diatom, Year, Zebra" 2 years, 4 months ago.
PluckyDog changed the tags on this post: they were "Formula, Percent, Grams, Kilograms, math" 2 years, 4 months ago.
PluckyDog closed this post.
This post has been closed, no more replies. Thanks!
Invite Others to Help
Seeing as this post is closed, no invites are allowed.