Japanese Diver Keeps Visiting His Best Friend Fish For Over 25 Years

While we’re used to see people usually bonding with pups or cats or farm animals, this extremely odd friendship between a diver and a fish baffles everyone. And like it isn’t weird enough already, these two unusual buddies share this special connection for over 25 years, now, writes daily-cuteness.

It all started many years ago, when the Japanese diver Hiroyuki Arakawa has been appointed to supervise a ‘torii’ – a sacred shrine to the Shinto religion. But this wasn’t like any other ‘torii’ as it stands beneath the surface of Tateyama Bay in Japan. Given its spiritual importance, Hiroyuki had to dive frequently in order to check the site’s condition. And since he kept doing that for so many years, the man ended up knowing even the marine creatures that used to live there. Particularly a wrasse fish the diver named Yoriko and with whom he shares such a lovely friendship.

Even if it sounds quite bizarre, Hiroyuki and Yoriko are getting along incredibly well and they can’t get the chance to see each other again. And no matter how unbelievable a friendship between a human being and fish sounds, apparently science even has an explanation for this. It turns out that fishes could actually recongnize human faces.

“Scientists presented the fish with two images of human faces and trained them to choose one by spitting their jets at that picture,” Dr. Cait Newport from Oxford University told CNN. “The researchers decided to make things a little harder. They took the pictures and made them black and white and evened out the head shapes. You’d think that would throw the fish for a loop. But no, they were able to pick the familiar face with a 86% accuracy.”

Find out more about this odd friendship, here:

This story originally appeared on daily-cuteness.com