Dolphin's new tail can help human amputees

Tangled in buoy line
She was a frail, dehydrated 3-month-old when she came to the hospital in December 2005. A fisherman found her tangled in the buoy line of a crab trap in Indian River Lagoon near Cape Canaveral. The line cut off the blood supply to her tail and it slowly fell off like shreds of paper as the aquarium team worked to save her life.

Winter learned how to swim without her tail, which is used for propulsion — amazing her handlers with a unique combination of moves that resemble an alligator’s undulating swimming style and a shark’s side-to-side tail swipes. Winter uses her flippers, normally employed for steering and braking, to get moving.

But her unique swimming style is sure to lead to spinal problems. She already sometimes bends her spine in an unnatural curve. Trainers work with Winter, now 6-feet-long and a healthy 180 pounds on an extensive physical therapy regimen, bending the tail up and down, to keep the right muscles strong.

Walsh said allowing Winter to work out daily with a prosthetic tail may keep her from deteriorating. It is unlikely she will wear the tail full-time.

Yuriko Nakao / Reuters file Fuji, a female bottlenose dolphin, has her artificial rubber tail attached at Okinawa Churaumi Aquarium in Motobu town, on the southern Japanese island of Okinawa. Fuji, lost 75 percent of her tail due to an unknown disease in 2002.

It’s uncharted territory. Fuji, an elderly dolphin that lives at an aquarium in Japan, has a prosthesis, but it is attached to the remaining part of his tail. Both of Winter’s tail flukes and peduncle, a wrist-like joint that allows a dolphin tail to move up and down, were lost.

Winter’s team also has to figure out how to keep the prosthesis from sliding off as the tail creates enough force to propel a 400-pound dolphin out of the water and 10 feet into the air.

“Every step we take is unknown,” Clearwater Marine Aquarium CEO David Yates said. “Another group came to us, analyzed her and said ... they didn’t know how to make the tail stay on. But Kevin came to us and said we’ve got the technology. We can do this.”

Carroll, who like the others on Winter’s team volunteers his time and resources, began by brainstorming elaborate vacuum attachments, but eventually settled on the simple silicone gel sleeve.

Handlers slide the sleeve over Winter’s stump and move her tail in up and down motions, teaching her how to swim like a normal dolphin when the prosthesis is attached.

Slow process
It is a slow process. They don’t want Winter to balk at the strange new attachment.

“I thought I could go down, cast her (tail stump) and put the tail on her,” Carroll said. “I didn’t understand the training that had to go with each fitting of the tail. Working with Winter, we’re on her time, not my time. If she’s ready to do something, we move forward. It’s the same way working with a child. It takes a lot of time.”

The team plans to keep socializing Winter with new pieces until, at a point yet to be determined, they will attach the first artificial tail flukes. They plan to start out with small flukes that create a little resistance.

“She is the perfect dolphin for what she has to do,” Yates said, watching Winter toy with a herring in her tank. “A lot of dolphins might reject this up front. But every step of the way she has excelled in everything we have asked her to do.”

One day soon, Winter’s new prosthetic should have her keeping pace with the aquarium’s two rambunctious male dolphins, Nicholas and Indy.

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