State Symbols (Part 2)

State Insect
In 1975, a third grader from Decatur proposed that Illinois make the Monarch Butterfly its state insect. After overwhelming political pressure from schoolchildren, the legislature caved and passed a bill apotheosizing the butterfly.

Tony Hisgett

The Monarch Butterfly (Danaus plexippus) has been legislated into official status by 6 other states, including Alabama and Texas. The only butterfly that migrates, the Monarch flies south to Mexico in the fall and returns in the spring. It's also one of the few insects that can make a transatlantic flight. The antennae of the Monarch contain a chemical called cryptochrome which reacts to light on the violet or blue end of the spectrum. When activated by blue light, cryptochrome becomes sensitive to the earth's magnetic field. Monarchs can't tell the difference between north and south, but they can align themselves on the north-south magnetic lines. It's basically a chemical compass. Many migratory birds have this chemical in their eyes. Don't feel bad. Humans also have cryptochromes that play a role in circadian rhythms, or your sleep-wake cycle. Some scientists think cryptochromes might provide insight into seasonal affective disorder.

The Monarch butterfly has no natural predators. The Monarch caterpillar eats milkweed and only milkweed. A chemical in milkweed, cardiac glycoside, builds up in the caterpillar's body and persists into adulthood. This chemical, often used medically in patients with heart failure, causes strong heart contractions. In an otherwise healthy individual, it can cause a heart attack. Butterflies don't have hearts (insects have a sort of open pump that swishes fluid around inside their body cavities), but birds and mammals who try to eat the Monarch do. Predators have long since learned to give the bug wide berth. Indigenous people from South America used extracts from milkweed to poison the tips of their arrows.

In the early 90s, then-representative Leon Panetta of California authored a bill nominating the Monarch Butterfly as national insect of the United States. Representative Steve Neal of North Carolina claimed any insect representing monarchy has no place in a Democratic society. He wrote a bill proposing the Honey Bee as a hardworking, Biblically-noted alternative to the monarchist tendencies of Panetta. Around this time, the Africanized Honey Bee crossed the Rio Grande. Also, the bee is totally Communist. Both bills died in sub-committee.

State Soil
Drummer Silty Clay Loam. The name Drummer comes from Drummer Creek, a tributary that flows into the Sangamon River just north of Champaign. Loam is a soil type that consists of sand, clay, and silt in specific quantities. Sand and silt both appear as rounded grains, sand visible to the naked eye and silt visible under a microscope. Clay, under a microscope, looks like flat, little plates. Imagine you have a shrink ray like Rick Moranis in Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. You shrink yourself to the point that sand grains look like large beach balls. At that size, you could use silt grains as golf balls and if you put clay particles in a bowl, they would look like corn flakes. Now unshrink yourself. Mix all those particles together and you have the dark, fertile loam, the best possible soil for growing field corn, field soybeans, and Christmas trees.

You can thank glaciation for much of the terrain in Illinois. As recently as the Pleistocene Era, about 75,000 years ago (back when we had woolly mammoths), a glacier covered most of Illinois. No one knows why a glacier advances or recedes, since climate change is obviously a myth, but when it did recede, it left the Illinois we know and love today.

Glaciers begin their lives as big piles of snow. The piles get so large that the snow compacts into giant cakes of ice that slide downhill. Voila! As the ice sheets migrate, drawn by the siren song of gravity, they grind all the rock beneath them into fine particles, like sand, silt, or clay. The Illinois glacier stopped near the Mississippi River, then started to melt. As it melted it revealed the silty clay loam that covers most of the state.

http://dnr.state.il.us/education/biodiversity/emaps.gif

All of the major Illinois rivers, the Illinois, the Sangamon, the Vermillion, the Kaskaskia, were formed as melting glacier water cut through the soft loam looking for a bigger body of water to join.

It also left some other features, peculiar to glacial activity. If a big chunk of ice breaks away from the glacier body, it melts by itself. I mean really big chunk of ice, some were a mile or more across. As the ice melts, it soaks the soil beneath it, making it soft. The weight of the ice chunk pushes down into the soft soil and sediment washing away from the melting glacier piles up around it. A cauldron-like depression forms, called a kettle. Kettles, when they melt, can form these roundish, deep kettle lakes like you see across Siberia and Northern Alaska (Wiley Post flew Will Rogers into one of these). Thoreau lived next to a kettle lake for a while called Walden Pond. Sometimes, though, if decomposing organic matter creates acidic conditions, the kettle becomes a bog. Volo Bog northwest of Chicago is one such bog.

My favorite glacial formation is called a moraine. Glaciers bulldoze massive piles of soil, rocks, and boulders in front of them as they move downhill. When they recede, you're left with a ridge called a moraine. If you've ever driven to Alberta, Canada, you had to drive through a moraine in the southern part of the province. Just northwest of Champaign, you can see glacier droppings at Moraine View State Park.

Here's where it gets crazy. Long Island in New York is a moraine formed by glacier activity. If you look at a map, you can see the mountain corridor that the glacier moved through, piling up mounds of rock and dirt that would later make a home for Brooklyn, Queens, and the Hamptons. The glacier eventually melted, leaving behind the Hudson River.

Sémhur