1. Aquatic entities occasionally carried into plankton (very small plants and animals) by unexpected factors, such as by a violent movements of air or heavy moisture: When Susan and the other botany students analyzed the plant masses off the shore of the lake, they discovered that a lot of tychoplankton had been swept into the plankton probably as the result of strong winds and water turbulence.
2. Planktonic forms, particularly algae, that become inadvertently entangled among mats of vegetation near the shore: Bill and Jane noticed a mass of tychoplankton entangled in the seaweed on the beach of the ocean.