For Dolphins, Echolocation May Be More Like ‘Touching’ Than ‘Seeing’ Dolphins seem to “feel” their way across the sea with narrow, sweeping beams of sonar ...

For a long time, we have assumed that echolocation allows dolphins that echolocate 'see' the world in a similar way to humans who develop the skill, but this does not seem to be the case.

Scientists define echolocation as a biological sonar system used by beings like dolphins to find their way underwater, hunt their prey, and communicate with other members of their kind.

If a river dolphin used low frequency sounds for echolocation, the sound waves might bounce off big things – like a giant underwater rock. But those waves might go around a little fish.

And the animals use the vocal fry register for echolocation. Yes, that vocal fryyyy. The work was published in the journal Science on Thursday.

This kind of tactile exploration may be the closest we can get to imagining the experience of dolphin echolocation, say the authors of a study on dolphin brains that was recently published in PLOS ...