Corkscrew Santuary

Corkscrew sanctuary is something I was not expecting.  I didn’t even know it was there and had no idea what I was getting myself in to. But as I looked around and tried to get the sense of feeling of nature I became more and more interested. I learned so much from the different kinds of trees, to birds, and animals. All of it was very new to me. I was raised up in a not so much commercialized area but coming out here and seeing how Mother Nature works is amazing. At one glance you will see huge cypress trees, different types of plants and then in the next second a huge alligator. It was so interesting to see how everything works together. While there I learned things that I never knew before. Such as fires are sometimes a good thing and how we are trying to re-establish a bird colony and the living machine. The living machine was the one thing that caught my eye. I have never even heard of it before. Corkscrew Sanctuary has the first living machine in Florida. It is used to reuse the water in the restrooms. It takes what ever gets flushed down the toilet to these two big tanks underground to start initial anaerobic digestion. It then goes to 5 different takes where these tanks are full of bacteria, green pants such as trees all the way to algae, and small animals. This is where nitrates comes from and are converted from ammonia and organic nitrogen. Now the water gets pumped into a sixth tank and then pumped out for the next step. This is where all the little sediments that made it through all of that get pushed back to the anaerobic tanks again to be broken down again. The water then goes to two plastic lined with artificial marshes filled with crushed limestone. With all the marsh in there it removes the last bit of nitrogen and converts it to the harmless nitrogen gas. But they also have the water get disinfected with chlorine and put into a holding tank and then travels to a chamber to dechlorinate the water with sodium sulfite. That is when it goes back into the toilets as the clean water that we saw. I would have never believed it unless I saw it. The living machine isn’t this big contraption it is a 40 x 40 area and helps the sanctuary a lot. For the fact they have so many people visiting this living machine really helps and promotes what can be done to help reuse water. I learned so much about nature and just really how everything works together. I really enjoyed this field trip.