Autotrophs

Autotrophs are organisms that can produce their own food, using materials from inorganic sources. The
word “autotroph” comes from the root words “auto” for “self” and “troph” for “food.” An autotroph is
an organism that feeds itself, without the assistance of any other organisms.

Autotrophs are extremely important because without them, no other forms of life can exist. Without
plants that create sugars from carbon dioxide gas and sunlight via the process of photosynthesis, for
example, no herbivorous animals could exist, and no carnivorous animals that eat herbivores could exist.

For this reason, autotrophs are often called “producers.” They form the base of an ecosystem’s energy
pyramid, and provide the fuel that all the heterotrophs (organisms that must get their food from others)
need to exist.

The first life forms on Earth would have had to be autotrophs, in order to exist and make energy and
biological materials in a previously non-living environment. Heterotrophs most likely evolved as
autotrophs became more common, and some life forms discovered that it was easier to simply eat the
autotrophs than to make energy and organic materials for themselves.

Types of Autotrophs

Scientists classify autotrophs according to how they obtain their energy. Types of autotrophs include
photoautotrophs, and chemoautotrophs.

Photoautotrophs

Photoautotrophs are organisms who get the energy to make organic materials from sunlight.
Photoautotrophs include all plants, green algaes, and bacteria which perform photosynthesis.

All photoautotrophs perform photosynthesis – a word that comes from the root words “light” and “to
make.” Photoautotrophs capture photons from the Sun and harvest their energy, using it to perform
important biochemical processes such as making ATP.

Photoautotrophs make more than just fuel and organic compounds for heterotrophs like ourselves!

Many photoautotrophs take carbon from the atmosphere and use it to make sugars and other molecules
that store the Sun’s energy in their molecular bonds. To do this, they take in molecules of CO2, which is
created by nonliving geological processes, and release molecules of O2 – also known as the oxygen we
need to breathe!

It is thought that free oxygen was not present in Earth’s atmosphere until after photoautotrophs became
common in Earth’s seas. Then, they produced so much free oxygen that large amounts of iron that had
previously been dissolved in ocean water reacted with the oxygen and turned into rust!

This process created rocks called banded iron formations, which we can still look at today to see this
record of our Earth’s history. The release of large amounts of free oxygen into Earth’s atmosphere by
photoautotrophs paved the way for large animals, like ourselves, who need the highly efficient process
of aerobic respiration to survive.

It is thought that some of the oxygen produced by photoautotrophs also created the Earth’s ozone layer,
which allowed life to move onto dry land without fear of DNA damage from the Sun’s UV light.

Chemoautotrophs

Chemoautotrophs are organisms that obtain energy from inorganic chemical processes. Today,
chemoautotrophs are most commonly found in deep water environments which receive no sunlight.
Many need to live around deep sea volcanic vents, which produce enough heat to allow metabolism to
occur at a high rate.

Chemoautotrophs use volatile chemicals such as molecular hydrogen, hydrogen sulfide, elemental sulfur,
ferrous iron, and ammonia as their energy sources. This makes them well-suited to live in places that
would be toxic to many other organisms, as well as places without sunlight. Chemoautotrophs are
usually bacteria or archaebacteria, as their metabolisms are usually not efficient enough to support
multicellularity.

Scientists have speculated that life might be able to exist in dark, chemically volatile environments such
as the seas of Jupiter’s moon Titan by using similar metabolisms to those seen in chemoautotrophs on
Earth. No proof of such life has yet been found, but some scientists believe that the range of metabolic
options offered by chemosynthesis drastically expands the range of places in the universe where we can
expect to find life.

It is actually unknown whether photoautotrophs or chemoautotrophs were the first life forms on Earth.
Many favor the idea that the first cells were photosynthetic, since the Sun’s light shines on the entire
surface of the Earth. But some scientists believe that volcanic sites in the deep sea or on the surface of
the Earth could have supplied more concentrated energy and more volatile chemicals, potentially leading
to the creation of the first cells.

These scientists speculate that these cells could then have evolved photosynthesis as an energy source
that would work anywhere on the Earth’s surface they spread further from their volcanic points of origin.

Because single cells and their biochemistry do not fossilize well, we may never know whether
chemoautotrophs or photoautotrophs were the first ever forms of life on Earth.

Examples of Autotrophs
Plants

Plants, with very few exceptions (such as the venus fly trap which can eat insects) are photoautotrophs.
They produce sugars and other essential ingredients for life by using their pigments, such as chlorophyll,
to capture photons and harness their energy. When plants are consumed by animals, animals are then
able to use that energy and those organic materials for themselves.

Green Algae

Green algaes, which may be familiar to you as pond scum, are also photoautotrophs. Green algae may in
fact bear a great resemblance to the first common life form on Earth – cyanobacteria, a green bacteria
that grew in mats and began the process of turning Earth into a world with an oxygen atmosphere.