Mississippi River Watershed – Major Industrial Rivers and Much More
The Illinois River
September 30, 2023
I have been travelling along some amazing rivers in the Mississippi watershed. They can be full of people boating and fishing, dotted with homes and seasonal camps, industrialized which comes with barge traffic, and include long expanses of wilderness. The Illinois River has some of all these things. After the crystal-clear waters of the upper Great Lakes, the Illinois is a green-brown turbid river carrying lots of sediment. Most of the banks are sandy which makes about 300 km of very lovely beaches. The start of the river is the confluence of the Kankakee and Des Plaines rivers near Chicago, so this also includes the mostly effluent waters of the ship and sanitary canal I wrote about. These upper waterways were once wetlands flowing north into Lake Michigan. They underwent extensive diversions, channelizing, and drain building since settlers arrived to create agricultural lands (Kankakee) plus the modern Illinois Waterway for today’s industrial shipping between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River’s watershed.
Close to riverside towns like LaSalle and Peoria, there are many people boating or fishing along the banks. The more remote river locations had seasonal homes along the river which were well designed for regular flooding with the houses on stilts with their water and fuel stored on roofs. This elevated living appears to be seasonal homes but may become normalized elsewhere in the western world because we like to build and live on river floodplains. Elsewhere in the world, living on stilts along rivers is normal, e.g., Brunei. Strange that the word “flood” describes a highly desired place for human dwellings, yet North Americans are massively annoyed, angered, and often devasted every time the river does what it does flooding its banks at least once every year. And for those who still believe we can engineer a walled city, remember Hurricane Katrina. Our planet’s climate is changing, escalating the number and intensity of weather events that destroy our dwellings along rivers and coastlines. These intensifying natural events also result in massive taxpayer bills, e.g., an estimated $23B per event in the USA (yes that’s billions), and disappearing insurance options for people.
The Illinois River flows through extensive wetlands like the Emiquon National Wetland Preserve and is home to the Illinois River Biological Station (IRBS) which is part of the famed Illinois Natural History Survey established in 1848. I encountered Golden and Bald eagles, Great Blue and Green herons, Egrets, Turkey and Black vultures, Belted kingfishers (now the mascot of the Fighting Illini), several turtle species, and more Asian carp - lots. It would be logical that the abundance of this invasive fish species was supporting the native fish-eating birds that were abundant along the riverbank. Sometimes the job of managing invasive species is a complexity of conflicts between bad and good outcomes. The bottom-line remains that we have never thought through the entirety of an introduction of a non-native species whether it was on purpose like the original carp introductions or the consequences of our activities we didn’t prepare for, e.g., the sea lamprey and zebra mussels in the Great Lakes. Back on the Illinois River, it is a beautiful riverscape worth touring and enjoying some beach time.
In Havana, IL I stopped in to visit the IRBS which was started in 1876 as a center within the University of Illinois. The current director, Jim Lamer gave me a tour of the station and we chatted about their long-term data sets, some going back to the 1800s, the invading Asian carp research and current state of that issue, plus the challenges of operating a modern-day research station, e.g., he needs to raise several million each year just as I do for my own research enterprise. Many people don’t realize that professors are more than teachers with summers off and that university researchers are basically small business operators chasing income to pay the bills of operating our enterprises; there is no magical money pot supporting science. Interestingly, within the university, it is often very difficult for some academics to understand this too, and when your research business is consuming 80 hours of your week, making you add more teaching to your workload isn’t tenable regardless of their dogmatic thinking about how universities should be run; but I digress, again. I was hoping to see another “iconic aquatic megafauna” the Paddlefish (Polyodon spathula) here or somewhere along the Mississippi River system. This is the last of the paddlefish species on the planet after about 65M years of existence of these fish. Alas, I only saw a replica they keep on the wall at IRBS. We did get to talk about freshwater mussels. These are another amazing group of animals with about 300 known species and 80 in Illinois. Many restaurants serve “mussels”, but those are ocean mussels, an entirely different animal. The freshwater mussel behaves like the ocean clam you may have dug on the seaside beach (or eaten in chowder). They are burrowers and thrive in sandy bottom rivers and lakes and thus their diversity and abundance in the Illinois River and across the Mississippi system. Their abundance also supported the early button industry and then the pearl industry, which I’ll write about farther downriver. Interestingly, mussels parasitize fish as part of their life cycle. They eject their larvae into the water where these tiny, immature mussels attach to the fish who distribute them throughout the waterbody because living in the sand and mud limits how far you can move in a lifetime. Some mussel species can lure fish in close with fleshy, fish-food-looking body parts. This codependence with fish is an interesting adaptation that arose from free-flowing rivers. Mussel diversity and numbers are also excellent predictors of a river’s health, that is, more mussels equate with a healthy ecosystem. One major human-caused issue for mussels are dams that block their fish hosts from travelling historical pathways. This is another example of our cascading impacts on natural ecosystems when we haven’t assessed the potential, full effects of our actions. I am willing to discuss forgiveness for a lack of knowledge about our impact on the environment pre-1950, but people like Rachel Carson made it abundantly clear that we were messing things up pretty badly by the 1960s, so there is no excuse really for the last 60 years of poor performance on our part.
The Illinois River was my first regular encounter with barge traffic which comes with loading and unloading docks. There is sand and crushed rock transport like I saw in Chicago, plus grain (wheat, oats, barley, sorghum, and rye) and corn being barged, e.g., about 7,000 tons of corn last week on this river alone. While I encountered some barges, I suspect traffic was down because the major Chicago market and transport hub wasn’t accessible due to closed locks. I am now heavily into the tow-boat and barge world with more stories coming your way.
One last factoid: Peoria’s modern claim to fame was being the home of Caterpillar heavy equipment (now moved away), but it was also a regional bootlegging capital and national center of whiskey distilling during the prohibition.
Until next time from somewhere down the lazy river,
Allen
Dover, TN
