Winter the dolphin died in 2021, but her story of a prosthetic tail continues to inspire people battling physical challenges.
Winter — and her prosthetic tail — go for a swim at the Clearwater Marine Aquarium outside of Tampa, Florida. Winter didn’t have an easy life in the beginning. At just a few months old, the bottlenose dolphin became tangled up in a crab trap in a lagoon in the Canaveral National Seashore in Florida. The rope cut off the circulation to her tail for some time before a fishing boat and a staff member from the SeaWorld Research InstituteWinter’s tail was lost, and had to be amputated.
“We had to start from scratch with the dolphin,” Carroll says. Nonetheless, he approached the challenge with an open mind. Carroll and his team used a spring blade system for the tail made of a carbon composite. The prosthetic would allow the dolphin to propel itself through the water, he says. But another challenge arose in how they would attach the artificial tail to Winter’s body. With people, there is often some piece of a residual limb that can be used as a foundation for the prosthetic. But dolphins move the entire lower section of their body, from side to side and up and down.
Ultimately, the prosthetics team used a suction system with a gel-like material that would stick to Winter’s torso using a kind of sleeve. The sleeve acts similar to the way you can’t easily pull off a rubber glove if you grab it by one finger. “That held in place pretty well,” Carroll says. But they also had to make sure that the skin wouldn’t gradually tear at the dolphin’s skin. “We wanted it super soft and super stretchy,” says Carroll.
“She’s just like a little dog,” Carroll says. “We were enjoying every aspect of it, we never looked at it like a challenge.” As for Winter herself, he notes that she didn’t always seem happy, but “had more up days than down days.”
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