December 10 2005 a bottlenose dolphin, with only three moths old, got trapped on a crab trap near florida. the rope cut off the blood supply to the tail, a little fishing boat spotted the little dolphin and a seaworld team took her to Clearwater marine aquarium.
the aquarium employees decided to name her Winter. Winter survived but giving that the reason that the tail was dead and useless and needed to be amputated.
At first it was thought that Winter would have to learn to swim without a tail, but this forced her to swim with a side to side body motion instead of the normal up and down motion that dolphins do, and the veterinarians feared that this unusual movement would damage her spine. Kevin carrol, who had designed prosthetics for other animals , volunteered to help and started working on a prosthetic tail for Winter. She broke the first tails that Carrol builded, they made her incomftarble and hurted her.
Carrol and a team of experts took a year and a half designing and testing a tail for Winter, eventually settling on a simple silicone and plastic tail. A gel-like sleeve was used under the tail, in order to prevent it from irritating Winter's skin. In Winter's case however, both the flukes and the caudal penducle had been severed, making the task much more difficult.
After Carrol found a way of building her the perfect tail winter learned aging how to swim and her health improoved.
Despite the odds against survival, Winter's energy and ability to adapt to her new physical form has become better than the expectations of many experts. Winter has done amazingly well in the short time since her stranding. She has completely healed, adapted to a new swim pattern, and learned to eat fish on her own...about twelve pounds a day! She is growing quickly, and now weighs in at 230 pounds!
Clearwater marine aquarium created a web page for people to learn the story about winter and find ways how they can help, also you can adopt her. the aquarium also instaled a camera on winter's pool so people in all the world can see her at any time. (http://www.seewinter.com/)
Winter's story was so motivating that when a movie director found out about it, didnt doubt to make her story a film. this movie is called Dolphin's Tale and shows exactly her story.
this story shows how with just a little faith and hope, big changes can happen, so always have faith and never loose hope.
SHE MAY HAVE LOST HER TAIL, BUT SHE'LL CAPTURE YOUR HEARTS.
