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| Recycled Dolphin Crayons by LittleDoodlers on Etsy, $7.50 |
Today while waiting for a doctor appointment, I picked up a magazine in the waiting area. (I was super excited to see that they had Scientific American and not just a bunch of gossip/lose weight without doing anything/housekeeping magazines). Anyways, in Scientific American, I found the coolest article about a dolphin who got a prosthetic tail!
When this dolphin, named Winter, was a baby, she got her tail caught in a crab trap. The trap cut off blood circulation to her tail and her tail basically died. They amputated her tail and she could swim without it. But because dolphins swim up and down and not side to side like fish, her adaptive swimming motion which was fish-like was putting a lot of pressure on her spine.
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| Winter with her stump tail |
Finally, Kevin Carroll heard about Winter and thought "I could make that dolphin a tail." So after much work, he did!
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| Winter with her prosthetic tail |
Dolphin skin is slippery and sensitive so they had to come up with a gel like covering to protect Winter's skin on her stump before they could attach a tail. Kevin Carroll and his team spent much time watching how dolphins swim and creating a tail for Winter.
The trainers at the aquarium where Winter lives trained her to allow the to put her tail on for her!
There's now a movie based on Winter's story called Dolphin Tale.
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