A project to restore coastal wetland leads to astonishing discoveries of a host of life: seeds and plant scraps, as well as water fleas, worms, larvae and planktonWhen Shelby Riskin was handed disk-shaped samples of century-old soil from Toronto’s waterfront, the ecosystem ecologist was hopeful she might find trace evidence of plants – cattails, bulrushes, water lilies and irises – that had once populated a long-destroyed wetland.But when she and a graduate student peered through a microscope, they watched in astonishment as a brown wormlike creature greedily munching through green clumps of algae as if more than 130 years hadn’t passed since its last meal. Continue reading...