Final answer:
The correct answer is option a. Less energy is transferred from plants as we move up the food pyramid due to the inefficiency of energy transfer between trophic levels, where only about 10 percent of energy is passed on to the next level.
Step-by-step explanation:
As we go further up the food pyramid, there is less energy transferred from plants. The correct answer to the question is A. Energy transferred.
Only about 10 percent of the energy at one trophic level actually passes on to the next higher trophic level. The rest of the energy is consumed by organisms at the current level for their metabolic processes, or is lost to the environment as heat or as incompletely digested food. Since energy transfer is less efficient at each successive level, there are generally fewer organisms and less biomass at higher trophic levels. This results in a pyramid shape for the distribution of biomass and energy among the trophic levels of an ecosystem.