just to set things straight; this was rendered in LightWave.
sorry if we got you thinking it was maya.

so the water is obviously not fluid dynamics : )) just a plane (more or less) with some animated procedural displacement map.
the trick is to stretch it a little in the direction the water is running, move it in this direction and a tiny bit up over time.
it took only 30 minutes to set up (the water).

as soon as I know how to export the cave mesh with it's weight maps (used for teh glow) to maya, I'm likely to run tests there to finally animate the penguins in maya... wish me luck : )