Definition of "heterotroph" []

• An organism that cannot synthesize its own food and is dependent on complex organic substances for nutrition. (noun)

American Heritage(R) Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright (c) 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

• "HANPP is definitely useful as a measure of the physical size of the economy relative to the containing ecosystem: It demonstrates how much of the trophic energy that would be available for wild-living animals and other heterotroph organisms in the absence of human activities is still in place."
• "A heterotroph is an organism that feeds off of another, or its byproducts (so both herbivores and carnivores), as opposed to an autotroph which produces its own energy from the environment (photosynthesis for example)."
• "The first organism would have therefore been a heterotroph deriving energy from this existing pool of nutrients."