Dolphins have long been considered the friendliest animal in the sea, and new research literally shows what the mammal sees when it encounters a human.
According to NBC News, the new image comes from SpeakDolphin.com, a research organization that seeks to "[advance] the field of human-cetacean communication in order to give dolphins and whales a greater voice in world affairs."
Dolphins were already known to use echolocation as a way to navigate the open ocean, they bounce sound waves off their surroundings to piece together what everything looks like.
"We've been working on dolphin communication for more than a decade," Jack Kassewitz, research team leader and founder of SpeakDolphin.com, said in a press release. "When we discovered that dolphins not exposed to the echolocation experiment could identify objects from recorded dolphin sounds with 92 percent accuracy, we began to look for a way for to see what was in those sounds."
To render the image of what a person looks like to a dolphin, the researchers meticulously recreated echolocation and came up with the 2-D image above. With the help of the CymaScope laboratory in the U.K., the researchers were also able to see a 3-D rendering of the image as well, Discovery News noted.
"We were thrilled by the first successful print of a cube by the brilliant team at 3D Systems," Kassewitz said. "But seeing the 3D print of a human being left us all speechless. For the first time ever, we may be holding in our hands a glimpse into what cetaceans see with sound. Nearly every experiment is bringing us more images with more detail."
