Science comes to aid of Winter’s tail

THE news from Florida’s Indian River Lagoon was too familiar: another dolphin gravely injured because of human action.

However, marine scientist Steve McCulloch immediately saw this rescue was unique. The baby bottlenose dolphin lost her tail, but perhaps her life could be saved.

Mr McCulloch, director of dolphin and whale research at the Harbour Branch Oceanographic Institution, decided to channel his anger into a solution.

The solution for the dolphin — dubbed Winter — may be a prosthetic tail. If the logistics can be worked out, Winter’s prosthesis would be the first for a dolphin who lost its tail and the key joint that allows it to move in powerful up and down strokes.

“There’s never been a dolphin like her,” said Dana Zucker, chief operating officer of the Clearwater Marine Aquarium, which is now Winter’s home.

A dolphin in Japan has a prosthesis, the first in the world, to replace a missing part of its tail.

Winter was a frail, dehydrated three-month-old when she came to the animal rescue centre in December. A fisherman found her tangled in the buoy line of a crab trap in Indian River Lagoon near Cape Canaveral.

The line tightened around her tail as she tried to swim away, strangling the blood supply to her tail flukes.

“It looked like paper,” Ms Zucker said of Winter’s tail. “Bit by bit over the weeks it just fell off.”

Winter was left with a rounded stump.

A team of more than 150 volunteers and veterinarians spent months nursing Winter back to health.

Winter learned how to swim without her tail, amazing her handlers with a combination of moves that resemble an alligator’s undulations and a shark’s side-to-side tail swipes.

She uses her flippers, normally employed for steering and braking, to get moving.

Winter can’t keep up with wild dolphins that can swim up to 25mph with strokes of their tail flukes.

She will be a permanent resident at the aquarium, even if she gets a prosthetic tail.