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 Institute helped rescue her in 2005.
Winter’s tail was lost, and had to be amputated. In many unfortunate cases, this is where the story would end. “But this was a very strong little dolphin,” says Kevin Carroll, vice president of prosthetics at the Hanger Clinic, a company that builds prosthetic limbs and provides orthopedic care for humans — and sometimes animals.
After the accident, Winter was sent to the Clearwater Marine Aquarium near Tampa. That's when Carroll and his team of prosthetists at Hanger got involved.
Carroll specializes in creating prosthetic ...
