Name: Shreayes Prabakaran Grade: 10 A What if all the plants go extinct? Our Earth is a huge playground for Mother Nature. She has a lot of bizarre creatures in her possession. All these organisms are her children. All those organisms are connected like the way siblings are. There are various methods to keep all these organisms in balance. One such method is the Food Cycle. The Food Cycle keeps all the organisms in balance. Let’s take a simple food chain as an example. There is the grass that is eaten by a deer and the deer is eaten by a tiger. In this simple food cycle, the grass is the producer, the deer is the primary consumer and a herbivore and the tiger is the secondary consumer and a carnivore. If the grass in the area go extinct, say, because of a wildfire, then the deer in that area will die of starvation because they are a herbivore or just migrate to a different place. The tigers would have to resort to a different organism for food because the deer population which is its primary source of food is very low. This example explains how complicated a food chain or food web is and how easy it is to knock off its balance. What role does a plant have in this? We all eat food, right? We eat food because we need energy. Imagine you ate chicken for breakfast. You obtained energy from the chicken. The chicken is also an organism. It also requires energy. Then, where did it get its energy from? Chickens eat grains of rice. Rice is a plant. Plants also require energy to live. They get their energy from the Sun. But, wait, the Sun is still there up in the sky. The plants haven’t eaten it, right? Then how did plants get their energy from the Sun? Plants don’t eat anything to get energy. They create energy with the help of the Sun’s rays. This process is called photosynthesis. The speciality of plants is that they are the only organisms that create their own energy. So, ultimately all the other organisms will have to depend upon plants for energy. Thus, whatever food chain or food web you take plants will always be at the beginning of it. Plants don’t just give us energy, they are useful for many other things like converting carbon dioxide produced by organisms in the air to oxygen. Now, imagine all the plants in the world have gone extinct. First of all, everyone would die of suffocation, not immediately but slowly because there are no plants to absorb the carbon dioxide in the air and convert it into oxygen for us to breathe. For whatever amount of time that you are going to be alive, you will see Earth walking towards its destination of destruction. The whole world will be in mayhem. Ecosystems would be collapsing all over the place because plants are the only energy source for the whole world. It will be really hard for any organism to survive without them. All the organisms are connected and co-exist. Without plants, the water cycle, carbon cycle, and nitrogen cycle would collapse and these elements wouldn’t be able to complete their cycle. The way plants have roots to help them balance and stay upright, we have plants that help us keep our Earth balanced and upright. Without plants, we would all go extinct. It will be really hard for us live. I hope a day like this doesn’t arrive. And, for that, we all have to join hands, plant trees and take care of them to make this world a better place for everyone to live in.
