Not a bit of it. We placed a plankton net in our rear, waited five minutes, and then hauled in a cornucopia of living things. There were little shrimp-like copepods and amphipods, each paddling so busily until warmth, I assume, got the better of them. There were Volvox lookalikes, round balls of little creatures fused together to make a sphere of life rather than a separated quantity of what books like to call animalcules. Undulating past them were the smallest of jellyfish, less than a millimetre in diameter, but precise replicas of their bigger brethren we may see when swimming nervously among them or treading between dead giants washed up along the shore.