With the massive whales come other giants of the sea, like whale sharks and sperm whales and occasionally hammerheads, sea lions and dolphins.
Imagining the prophet Jonah boarding his ship in Jaffa just days before he was cast into the sea and swallowed by a whale, I piled into the Israeli girls' car and continued my strange little pilgrimage.
There are at least 260 species of reef-building coral and 70 species of sponges, plus dugong (a manatee cousin), sharks, manta rays, and about 14 species of whale, dolphin, and sea turtles.
He brings me to the summit of a little mountain to take in a panorama of the bay and, with any luck, to spot some of Palawan's celebrity fauna: green sea turtles, dugongs, sharks, whale sharks and the world's most adorable ungulate, the Chihuahua-size Philippine mouse deer.
The turtle is the latest in a large number of sea creatures, including a 40 tonne fin whale, to be found on beaches around Wales.
BBC: NEWS | UK | Wales | South West Wales | Dead turtle washed up on beach
Most visitors venture out with operators like Baja Paradise to see the whale sharks who live in the Sea of Cortez year round, or travel to the pink cliffs on the nearby island of Espiritu Santo, home to a colony of sea lions.
However, they were identified as sperm whales by Nick Davies, who runs Gairloch-based Hebridean Whale Cruises and is involved in a Sea Watch project.
Tiger sharks and the occasional great white and whale shark can be seen farther out to sea.
Dr Frantzis, who has just published his data in Nature, studies Cuvier's beaked whale a denizen of the Ionian sea off Greece's west coast, among other places.
The Song of the Whale crew sailed the busy fishing ground of the Baltic Sea for the first time this summer listening for signs of harbour porpoises.
Leaving popular Whitehaven Beach, paddle towards Peter Bay, 19km north on Whitsunday Island, where you may see a sea eagle gracefully plucking dinner from the ocean and perhaps a humpback whale breaching the surface.
It was Dr. Kenney who took credit for naming Shamu, the famed killer whale, and then figured out how to fly her to Sea World from Seattle.
Deliberately sinking a dead whale is done for scientific studies because it is so rare to find the carcasses at sea.
But like the Shamu show at Sea World, the place is always jammed -- and when you think about it, the whale doesn't really do all that many tricks considering the time you waited.
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