It’s more than 60 years since I first encountered moss microfauna. After l lost an eye in an accident, my parents bought me an inspired gift: a beginner’s microscope, to while away my days of recuperation. Casting around for something to look at, I mounted some moss in a drop of water on the glass slide – and stumbled into the world of what Victorian microscopists called infusoria: life forms that materialise when dead vegetation is incubated in water; anhydrobiotic organisms that can survive prolonged drought, often as cysts, until revived by rain.