Talk:Heterotroph

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This article is or was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Yuyanchen97, Kimwayne.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 23:25, 16 January 2022 (UTC)

Untitled
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 caure 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)

The flow chart may be confusing, but it does express some of the relationships; perhaps a Venn diagram would be better. In any case, the use of chemotroph in the text in paragraph 2 doesn't match the use of chemotroph in the flow chart. Alan M. Friedman (talk) 02:07, 9 December 2018 (UTC)

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)

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.

Agreed on the flowchart, it needs fixing. Also lacking enough explanation, e.g "Obtain carbon elsewhere" elsewhere from what? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 85.210.64.184 (talk) 16:48, 7 April 2009 (UTC)

Autotrophs don't make their own food
Food (or nutrients) is material that an organism takes up from the environment to obtain all the essential elements, not just carbon, and/or energy for growth and reproduction. So autotrophs and heterotrophs both need food, they just have different diets. For carbon, autotrophs eat CO2 and heterotrophs eat organic molecules. Siegele (talk) 23:22, 10 July 2014 (UTC)

Assessment comment
Substituted at 17:51, 29 April 2016 (UTC)

Newest edit of the ecology section
I forgot to add an edit summary so I will post it here. For my edit I expanded on fermentation and respirations' roles in heterotrophs in relation to ecology. I also expanded on mineralization. --Yuyan Chen (talk) 00:48, 20 November 2017 (UTC)

What about methanotrophs?
Are methanotrophs categorized as autotrophs or heterotrophs?

Methanotrophs obtain carbon by taking in methane as a gas dissolved in their environment. Chemically, methane is "organic" (see organic compound) but the methane that methanotrophs eat typically is abiotic – ecologically "inorganic" (see organic matter) – produced by geologic processes – does not immediately derive from some organism.


 * Like propper autotrophs, methanotrophs are primary producers of organic molecules in their environments; they can be eaten by other organisms, but do not require either the body parts or waste products of other organisms for food.


 * Like conventional heterotrophs, methanotrophs do not inspire CO$2$, but rather take in carbon as a (chemically) organic molecule, which they use for both a source of carbon and as a source of energy.

Unlike conventional heterotrophs, methanotrophs can and do survive eating carbon (methane) that has never been a part of any organism. As a thought experiment, methanotrophs could presumably thrive in a suitably comfortable environment on a methane-rich but originally lifeless planet (think of somewhere warm, deep inside Titan, for example).


 * Some geologic methane is geologically primordial, and some is from cooked sediments that are a slow-moving branch of the carbon cycle. I'd say that all geologic methane counts as abiotic, since even if it was once biotic, it's been recycled via an abiotic process. The primordial carbon still in the Earth never has been a part of any organism and it looks, smells, and tastes the same as methane from recycled carbon.

So has this already been worked out? Where do the methane-eaters fit in this classification system? And does the categorization discussed in the article need to be re-written so that autotrophs are allowed to eat methane?

Astro-Tom-ical (talk) 03:11, 28 December 2019 (UTC)