It's eat or be eaten, and sometimes both, accompanied by hot jazz and plenty of frantic drumming in Painlevé's survey of the life in a nice freshwater pond. It turns out it's full of hideous creatures, all hungry all the time and attacking each other in various disgusting ways, sure to send anyone who likes the occasional dip in clean water over to the nearest swimming pool and its nice, safe, dead, chlorinated water.
It's clear evidence of Painlevé's black humor and clear supporting evidence in why your mother -- well mine, anyway -- told me not to go swimming right after eating. Watching a beautiful dragonfly hover above the water, one would never guess how bizarrely its larvae dine, nor imagine that the deadly scorpion has an even more chthonic cousin that lives in the water.
