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Young World
Winter’s day
COMPILED BY SUBAJAYANTHI. B
Photo: AP
Learning to swim : Winter with a prostheic tail.
Every year, thousands of dolphins get entangled in fishing nets. Marine scientist Steve McCulloch, director of dolphin and whale research at the Harbour Branch Oceanographic Institution, was confronted with the situation of a baby bottlenose dolphin from Indian River Lagoon (near Cape Canaveral) who lost her tail. McCulloch channelled his anger into a solution: a prosthetic tail. Winter, as the dolphin is called, would be the first dolphin to benefit a whole tail prosthesi
s, giving her more power on the tail movement. A fisherman found the three month old dolphin in December, frail and dehydrated, tangled in the buoy line of a crab trap. The line strangled the blood circulation to her tail flukes, and bit by bit over the weeks the tail just fell off. Winter was left with a rounded stump. Winter learned how to swim without her tail with a combination of moves that resemble a crocodile’s undulations and a shark’s side-to-side tail swipes, using her flippers, normally employed for steering and braking, to get moving.
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