This isn't an exhaustive list of all the steps but here's a rough rundown of how I created the water aspects: 

- Make 2 solid layers one with radio waves on it and one with wave world
- On the radio waves layer add a turbulent displace and a fast box blur
- Parent the producer points of both these effects to a null
- Animate a null's position according to how you want your duck (or aquatic animal of choice) to move
- Precompose everything 
- Add a turbulent noise layer with low contrast, low complexity and large scale then add a time expression on the evolution until it looks like gently moving water. Blend this with the layer you've just precomposed using a blending mode (or using extract) This noise layer is just to introduce some subtle randomness and if you over do it then your duck will look like she's swimming in a stormy open sea
- Add an adjustment layer on top of everything with CC glass and set the bump map to the precomp layer - turn the softness way up and the displacement too - this makes for a more unified turbulent look as the noise layer is being affected by the radio waves and wave world
- Precompose everything again
- Duplicate this precomp twice and time offset your different iterations by dragging some of them forwards or back a few frames.
- Use extract to get varying degrees of transparency and Curves and Hue and saturation to get some different colors on the various layers - this is the most time consuming and difficult stage. Using effects like colourama, tritone, cc toner etc. are also valid ways of getting the color mix