With more than 300 species of birds visiting or living along The Beaches of Fort Myers & Sanibel, visitors come from all over the world to explore sites along the shoreline, shallow mud flats, inland waters, back bays and forests. Birds are so prevalent in the area, it’s been named the top bird-watching destination in the U.S. by USA Today. Bird-watchers can spot egrets, wood storks, ibis and herons of every description and color. Rarities such as limpkins and reddish egrets may also be seen, as well as birds of prey such as red-shouldered hawks, bald eagles and osprey.

Mark Kiser of the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission serves as birding trail coordinator. The Florida Birding Trail program identifies interesting sites for bird-watchers in a Birding Trail guide available, free, at the Audubon Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary or www.floridabirdingtrail.com.

Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary was selected as a premier or “gateway” site because of its extensive services for visitors, from a 2.25-mile boardwalk, to state-of-the-art Blair Audubon Center and a variety of educational activities, as well as more than 200 species of birds, including the largest nesting colony of endangered wood storks. The area encompasses more than 13,000 acres of natural habitats; there’s even the largest stand of old-growth bald cypress trees.

Bio Pyramid

All of the organisms in the world follow orders of classification. Whether you choose to put them into groups of plants and animals, herbivores and carnivores, or any other of the many different types of classification systems, organisms can be put into many groups in order to understand their relationship to one another. One way to classify organisms is to put them into their order, or hierarchy, in the food chain. In this way, we can see how animals and other organisms relate to each other based on what they consume.

There are several different ways to look at the food chain, and one important and useful tool in this area is the bio pyramid. A bio pyramid is a graphical chart that shows the comparative mass of the consumers to the producers in the food chain. This can be helpful in determining how energy is transferred to the top levels of the pyramid from the bottom levels.

Each level in a bio pyramid is composed of a trophic level. Trophic levels are groupings of different “consumer” groups, such as primary producers (usually just plants or other photosynthetic organisms) rising all the way up to carnivores (such as humans). While a typical biological pyramid might group these consumers in order of energy produced, a bio pyramid shows them in order of total mass from highest to lowest. This often means that the primary consumers, such as the plants, are at the bottom because they are more numerous and take up more mass. The levels are built upon then by how many upper level organisms could survive based on the level below. An example can be seen in this sea bio pyramid:

It would take 1,000,000 kg of phytoplankton (1st level), to feed 100,000 kg of zooplankton (2nd level), to feed 10,000 kg of shrimp (3rd level), to finally feed 1,000 kg of large fish. The final level, the 5th, would only be able to have 100 kg of shark supported by the levels below.

In this way, a bio pyramid shows the inefficiency of the food chain, and lets researchers know that if a level was able to be skipped (such as a shark dipping down and eating shrimp instead of fish), more energy would be conserved and the food chain would lose less energy along the way. Given this fact, a bio pyramid is an important tool when looking at the laws of conservation of energy among different classes of organisms.

All said and done, it was not misplaced respect; the sun certainly is an abundant and limitless source of power, at least for several generations to come; the merits for using its solar energy are numerous.

It’s free

Every morning with each dawn, the solar energy released by the sun comes filtered through our atmosphere providing light and helping to radiate heat. This has been happening for millions of years yet it is only recently that we have begun to capitalize on this abundant source of almost infinite power.

In the past the Greeks and the Egyptians have been known to harness the power of the sun to heat whatever they wished to by concentrating its radiation.

It’s non-polluting

The energy from the sun is clean and free of any pollutants; unlike various sources of energy present today like petroleum or organic fuels that leave back residues and often leave back harmful gases when utilized to create energy.

Extremely reliable

The sun has been burning for roughly four and a half billion years now and is likely to burn on for another four to five billion years to come. That’s definitely more than our lifetimes and certainly more than several generations of the future. Every morning it promptly shows up and vanishes for the evening while it lights up another portion of the globe.

The saying “as sure as day” did not come about for nothing; assuming the sun is shining brightly, depending on which part of the globe you are you can harness the energy of the sun to either store it away or utilize its energy in a different way.

Limitless

There is no restriction on how much energy we can use from the sun. Apparently, the amount of energy that comes from the sun every few minutes if successfully harnessed can power the entire United States of America for a whole year. If we were only able to harness the immense energy of the sun we would be able to solve all the worlds’ energy problems.

Why

Ever wonder why no one thought about this earlier? How come if there’s so much energy just lying around, we simply cannot seem to efficiently harness it? How it that so much of the sun energy seems to go totally unnoticed and is ultimately wasted?

Well one of the reasons that this wonderful power reserve is generally wasted is the fact that the sunlight that we actually receive is so thinly dissipated across the earth to be able to contribute substantially enough if we try to harness it.
For us to be able to actually harness the power of the sun we have to be able to manipulate, focus and store the sun’s energy. While this may seem simple it is easier said than done; So far we have only managed to develop three partially successful means of collecting solar energy.

The Reflection Method – Mirrors / Parabola

The reflection method is based on the concentration of the sun’s rays through a single or a set of mirrors onto one point and then utilizing the concentrated heat energy that is produced for out need. A parabolic mirror much like a dish antenna can be used to capture the sun’s rays and focus them on a single point.

The radiation method

This is the principle behind the solar water heaters. Painted black pipes sandwiched between two layers of glass, have water inside them that is heated thanks to the rays of the sun.

Solar panels

A more recent invention the ‘solar cell’ is composed of treated silicon crystals, which when hit by the rays of the sun knock electrons out of their orbits and thereby create a void that needs to be filled by electrons from the other silicon crystals, this creates an imbalance of electrons and hence a flow of current which can be either immediately utilized or else stored away in a rechargeable battery.

What’s stopping us?

Despite the apparent benefits of using solar power it is most unfortunate that there are very few solar power plants around the world. Sadly, with today’s level of technology, cost and reliability are two major factors that are still hurdles in the way of mass usage of solar energy.

Technological limitations dictate that the most efficient solar cells created today are still not capable of generating enough power to be commercially viable without occupying huge surface areas. Furthermore, reliance exclusively on solar cells in not yet practical, for if there were to be a cloudy day it could reduce the amount of electricity generated and that would be disastrous for those people completely reliant on that energy.

On the bright side, constant innovation and research on solar energy is resulting in much more efficient solar cells that are a fraction of the size of existing cells and churn out much more power. For now they are still expensive, but not far is the day when they will be affordable and available to the common man.

As Remi Wilkinson, Senior Analyst with Carbon Free, puts it, inevitably, the growth of distributed generation will lead to the restructuring of the retail electricity market and the generation, transmission and distribution infrastructure. The power providers may have to diversify their business to make up for revenues lost through household energy microgeneration. She is referring to the conclusions by a group of UK analysts, herself included among them, who call themselves Carbon Free. Carbon Free has been studying the ever-growing trend toward alternative energy-using homes in England and the West. This trend is being driven by ever-more government recommendation and sometimes backing of alternative energy research and development, the rising cost of oil and other fossil fuels, concern about environmental degradation, and desires to be energy independent. Carbon Free concludes that, assuming traditional energy prices remain at their current level or rise, microgeneration (meeting all of one’s home’s energy needs by installing alternative energy technology such as solar panels or wind turbines) will become to home energy supply what the Internet became to home communications and data gathering, and eventually this will have deep effects on the businesses of the existing energy supply companies.

Carbon Free’s analyses also show that energy companies themselves have jumped in on the game and seek to leverage microgeneration to their own advantage for opening up new markets for themselves. Carbon Free cites the example of electricity companies (in the UK) reporting that they are seriously researching and developing ideas for new geothermal energy facilities, as these companies see geothermal energy production as a highly profitable wave of the future. Another conclusion of Carbon Free is that solar energy hot water heating technology is an efficient technology for reducing home water heating costs in the long run, although it is initially quite expensive to install. However, solar power is not yet cost-effective for corporations, as they require too much in the way of specialized plumbing to implement solar energy hot water heating. Lastly, Carbon Free tells us that installing wind turbines is an efficient way of reducing home electricity costs, while also being more independent. However, again this is initially a very expensive thing to have installed, and companies would do well to begin slashing their prices on these devices or they could find themselves losing market share.

At the Earths’ core, the temperature is 60 times greater than that of water being boiled. The tremendous heat creates pressures that exert themselves only a couple of miles below us, and these pressures contain huge amounts of energy. Superheated fluids in the form of magma, which we see the power and energy of whenever there is a volcanic eruption, await our tapping. These fluids also trickle to the surface as steam and emerge from vents. We can create our own vents, and we can create out own containment chambers for the magma and convert all of this energy into electricity to light and heat our homes. In the creation of a geothermal power plant, a well would be dug where there is a good source of magma or heated fluid. Piping would be fitted down into the source, and the fluids forced to the surface to produce the needed steam. The steam would turn a turbine engine, which would generate the electricity.

There are criticisms of geothermal energy tapping which prevent its being implemented on the large scale which it should be. Critics say that study and research to find a resourceful area is too costly and takes up too much time. Then there is more great expense needed to build a geothermal power plant, and there is no promise of the plant turning a profit. Some geothermal sites, once tapped, might be found to not produce a large enough amount of steam for the power plant to be viable or reliable. And we hear from the environmentalists who worry that bringing up magma can bring up potentially harmful materials along with it.

However, the great benefits of geothermal energy would subsume these criticisms if only we would explore it more. The fact that geothermal energy is merely the energy of the Earth herself means it does not produce any pollutants. Geothermal energy is extremely efficient—the efforts needed to channel it are minimal after a site is found and a plant is set up. Geothermal plants, furthermore, do not need to be as large as electrical plants, giant dams, or atomic energy facilities—the environment would thus be less disrupted. And, needless to say, it is an alternative form of energy—using it would mean we become that much less dependent on oil and coal. Perhaps most importantly of all—we are never, ever going to run out of geothermal energy, and it is not a commodity that would continuously become more expensive in terms of real dollars as time passes, since it is ubiquitous. Geothermal energy would be, in the end, very cheap, after investigation and power plant building costs are recouped.