SCIENCE LAB SPECIAL : AQUATIC CONVENTION

'OVERFLOW crowd of dolphins appears in the waters of a California bay'. On a small inflatable boat on a Friday last month, Evan Brodsky and two co-workers with a whale watching tour company were on the lookout for gray whales on the Pacific blue water of Monterey Bay, along the central coast of California.

After four hours of searching, the team had spotted only one whale .

Usually the team would head back to the harbour at that point. But Mr. Brodsky, a boat captain and videographer with the tour company Monterey Bay Whale Watch, said he had an ''itch'' that there was something the group could not just see and decided to stay out on the water.

First, the team of three spotted about 15 dolphins swimming together. It followed the small pod,  knowing that dolphins are highly social marine animals that usually travel in larger groups.

Some 30 minutes later, 15 dolphins had turned into hundreds. Then there were thousands.

''I kind of just take a glance and scan the horizon, and maybe about a mile and a half from us the water literally looked like it was boiling,'' Mr. Brodsky, 35, said. '' It was foaming. There were so many dolphins there.''

In previous outings, Mr. Brodsky had seen pods of hundreds, sometimes thousands of dolphins.

But this was the first time that he had seen a gathering of so many northern right whale dolphins, and there were Pacific white-sided dolphins mixed in.

On the basis of his drone sightings and his experience on the water, Mr. Brodsky estimated that there were more than 2,000 dolphins in the pod his team saw that Friday.

'' The whole time we were just saying : ' Oh my gosh, oh my gosh, this is so amazing, I can't believe this,'' he recalled.

His team is on the water almost every day. But Mr. Brodsky said that the sight of the dolphins still gave him '' butterflies.''

The World Students Society thanks Sara Ruberg and Christina Morales.