After Florida Drained a Wetland Biologists Found What Had Been Living Under It

“It’s a crime scene,” said an ecologist who’s worked these ditches since the 90s. “Every layer of mud is a clue. Fertilizer, legacy pollution, busted hydrology, then the invaders riding the cracks we made.”

Not everything was ruin. On a higher patch, a rectangle of earth baked to crust, someone brushed aside a film of dried algae with a boot and found the first green spike. Then another. “Seed bank,” Núñez said, allowing herself a grin. “They’ve been waiting.” Within a week, in pockets the catfish hadn’t undermined, needle rush and maidencane stitched back into place like careful sutures. Tiny crayfish clicked through new puddles. Grass shrimp came in translucent clouds. “If you give the Everglades half a chance, it remembers,” said a botanist, sounding a little like a preacher.

The trouble is in the halves. Water managers wrestle a state built on pumps and promises. Push water south, a neighborhood floods. Hold it back, a refuge starves. Open a gate at the wrong hour and you create a feast in one square and a funeral in the next. “People want a switch,” said a hydrologist, watching an airboat drag a groaning net. “This is a dimmer. And the bulb is flickering.”

By evening, the predator pit had calmed to a low boil—alligators anchored like buoys, birds thick on the trees. The crew kept working in the burnt‑sugar light, counting what lived, tagging what shouldn’t, lifting what could be saved into aerated tanks humming in the back of pickup trucks. “It looks like chaos,” Núñez said, “but it’s a ledger. We’re writing down a debt that’s been compounding for a hundred years.”

On TikTok, a local fishing guide stared into his phone, sunburnt and earnest. “You drain a wetland, you don’t just move water,” he said. “You flip the table. All the pieces slide. Some fall off.” A commenter fired back: “So stop draining them?” The guide exhaled. “We got people. We got farms. We got hurricanes. It’s not that simple, man.”

Nothing is, not here. An old timer at a bait shop on the Tamiami Trail shrugged when the python video played on a loop above the counter. “Swamp keeps secrets,” he said, sliding a bag of ice across to a young couple in park tees. “You take the water off, it tells you some. Not all.”

That night, the smell eased. The stars came out hard and clean. In the dark, the banks ticked as they dried, the way cooling engines click after a drive. Somewhere in the black, a gator bellowed—a prehistoric foghorn. On a folding chair by the trucks, Núñez scrolled through the day’s clips—burrows like bullet holes, a python’s dull gold eye, a child’s comment under the drone shot: Why is the water gone?

She typed and deleted and typed again, then set the phone down. “Because we thought we could fix Florida with straight lines,” she said to no one in particular. “Now we’re trying to bend them back.” Continue reading…