Lindeman efficiency

Lindeman efficiency is the empirical regularity, first quantified by Raymond Lindeman in 1942, that only approximately 10% of the energy stored in biomass at one trophic level is converted into biomass at the next trophic level. The remaining 90% is lost to metabolic processes, heat dissipation, locomotion, and other life functions. This constraint, often called the ten-percent law, is one of the most robust regularities in ecology and shapes the maximum length of food chains, the biomass structure of ecosystems, and the vulnerability of apex predators to extinction.

The Lindeman efficiency is not a law in the strict physical sense but a statistical regularity arising from thermodynamic constraints on biological energy conversion. It connects ecology to thermodynamics through the second law: energy conversions are never perfectly efficient, and biological systems — operating far from equilibrium — must pay an entropic cost for every transfer. The efficiency varies across ecosystems and taxa, ranging from less than 1% in some aquatic systems to over 20% in highly efficient converters, but the 10% figure remains a useful rule of thumb.

The concept has been criticized for reinforcing the linear food chain model, since it is often taught as if energy flows through a single predetermined pathway. In reality, energy flows through food webs along multiple edges simultaneously, and the Lindeman efficiency applies to each edge individually, not to the system as a whole. The network perspective reveals that Lindeman efficiency is a local constraint on individual predator-prey interactions, while the food chain model incorrectly treats it as a global property of the entire ecosystem.