heterotroph
noun
Heterotroph — a living thing that must feed on others to survive
Definition
An organism that depends on complex organic substances for nutrition
In depth
A heterotroph is an organism unable to manufacture its own food from sunlight or simple chemicals, instead depending on complex organic matter produced by other living things — every animal, fungus, and most bacteria fall into this category. The word marks a fundamental division in the living world, between those that create and those that consume.
Origin
The word combines Greek heteros, other or different, with trophe, nourishment, a coinage that emerged alongside 'autotroph' in late nineteenth-century biology as scientists sought precise vocabulary for the new science of nutrition. The pairing of the two terms reflects a broader Victorian impulse to classify the living world into tidy, complementary categories.
Usage examples
"As a heterotroph, the mushroom drew its nourishment from the decaying log rather than from sunlight, as a plant would."
"The lecture traced the long evolutionary path by which the first heterotrophs learned to survive on the labor of other organisms."
"Humanity, for all its inventions, remains stubbornly a heterotroph, dependent on the green world it so often forgets to thank."
How to use it
Heterotroph is firmly a scientific term, most at home in biology and ecology writing, though it occasionally appears in essays that want to make a philosophical point about dependency, consumption, or humanity's place within larger ecological systems.
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