In an area off the antarctic coast, elephant seals consume 200,000 calories of squid and small fish every month. how much energy must these squid and small fish consume to sustain the elephant seal population?

The transfer of energy through the food chain is around 10%. So basically we have a situation where the producers have 100% of energy, the organism that consumes them gets 10% of it, the organism that consumes that organism gets 10% of the 10% that organism got and so on to the top of the food chain.

Since the elephant seals consume 200,000 calories from the squid and small fish, this means that the squid and the small fish get 2,000,000 calories from their food, thus they are able to sustain the population of elephant seals.

We got to this result just by multiplying the number of calories the elephant seals get with the number 10, as they only get 10% of the calories of the squid and fish.

d. platinum would have the greatest temperature increase because it has the lowest specific heat.