Autotroph
/ˈɔtəˌtroʊf/noun
An organism that builds its own food from inorganic material, using light or chemical energy.
The Greek roots
Literally: “self-feeding”
The story of the word
German plant physiology produced the term near the end of the nineteenth century, once it was clear that green plants and certain bacteria do something animals cannot: assemble carbon compounds out of carbon dioxide. τροφή, nourishment, runs through a whole medical vocabulary where it usually appears in the negative, as in atrophy, wasting for lack of feeding, and dystrophy, feeding gone wrong. Every food chain has autotrophs at the bottom, including the chemosynthetic ones around deep-sea vents that never see the sun.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → scientific coinage → German → English
- First recorded
- around 1900
Same family
In a sentence
Cyanobacteria were the autotrophs that filled the atmosphere with oxygen.
Without autotrophs the whole column above them starves.