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Injured Dolphin May Soon Get A New Tail.
Date : 08/09/2006
An Atlantic bottlenose dolphin that lost her tail after being tangled in a crab trap line near Cape Canaveral may be getting a new one.
Winter, a ten-month-old bottlenose dolphin, was found in December and is now being cared for at the Clearwater Marine Aquarium.
Though tail-less Winter has learned to swim from side to side like a shark, doctors are concerned however that her inability to quickly swim up and down or jump like other normal dolphins may cause her problems later in her life and may even shorten her life span.
Aquarium authorities say that they are not sure how Winter got stuck in the trap, but by the time rescuers found her,she was tangled in a crab trap line in Mosquito Lagoon at Canaveral National Seashore. The then two-month old Winter was all by herself."Her mother was not with her," Diane Mitchell, animal care director at the aquarium told the Florida Today.
"The line was stuck around her like a rubber band where it cuts off all your circulation. By the time she came to us her whole tale was white and a lot of the tissue had died," she added.
Jim Savage of New Smyrna Beach was on his way to fish early Dec. 10, when he spotted a crab trap buoy moving the opposite direction as the wind. He found the 3-month-old dolphin clutched in a "C" shape by the trap lines. "They were dug into her. I cut all the ropes off of her," Savage said.
One piece of rope remained through the dolphin's mouth when Teresa Mazza, a biologist with Hubbs-SeaWorld Research Institute in Orlando, arrived.
"When we found her, the skin had kind of fluffed off her tail," Mazza said.
Winter almost died. She suffered deep rope wounds on both sides of her mouth, across the tongue, under both pectoral fins and her tail. Wounds on the upper and lower tail were so deep that blood flow stopped. The tail tissue died and fell off within days of arrival at the aquarium.
The wounds healed, but the tail continues to shed dead tissue. It will need to fully heal before the design of a prosthetic tail begins, biologists said.
"She swims like a shark. She's still quite feisty," said Diane Mitchell, animal care director at Clearwater Marine Aquarium. "She is the cutest little thing you'd ever see and has such a great personality."
Officials at the Aquarium hope to raise about $100,000 dollars from donations to help pay such tails throughout her lifetime. They hope to fashion an artificial tail for her similar to the black rubber one biologists put on a 34-year-old dolphin named Fuji in 2004 in Okinawa, Japan. That tail was made by Bridgestone Corp., using technology associated with Formula One auto racing. The tail was specially made to have the proper density and flexibility for swimming.
But Fuji was an easier case. That dolphin was full-grown and parts of the tail fluke remained. Biologists say a tail transplant for Winter is complicated by the fact that she lost her entire tail and a few vertebrae.
Also, she must have several replacements as she grows larger.
Officials say that now nearly one year old Winter has fully recovered and is feeding well and is now nearly 1 year old, is about 4.5 feet long and 110 pounds.
Her caretakers hope to develop a new tail soon, because her unique swimming style has them worried.
"We're not sure if by the time she's 10 years old it's going to cause some spinal damage," Mitchell said.
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Source: All Headline News & florida today