Frankenstein's Cat: Cuddling Up to Biotech's Brave New Beasts (15 page)

Etienne Benson, the author of
Wired Wilderness: Technologies of Tracking and the Making of Modern Wildlife
, expresses mixed feelings about these advances. “We’re tracking everything,” he says. “Almost everywhere you go there is a committee of scientists or wildlife managers that is trying to manage the world. I think we can ask questions about what kind of world it is we’re creating where we want to manage and keep track of everything. All the time.” Benson, a research scholar at Berlin’s Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, says electronic tags appeal to us because they provide another way to bring the wild world under our control. The rise of the tracking devices in the first place was driven by the fact that, as Benson puts it, “Wildlife managers needed to make
manageable
wildlife.” (The Craigheads’ research, after all, was spurred by a desire to keep grizzlies and humans away from each other.)

While Benson acknowledges that tracking devices can generate valuable data, he wonders whether we’re being seduced by our new tools: “Do we really think that if we put a tag on everything, we’re going to resolve problems of living harmoniously in nature or having a sustainable world of resources?” he says. “It’s a kind of utopianism: ‘If we just get everything tagged, if we just get the right sensor network out there, then everything’s going to work fine.’”

Clearly, just knowing the whereabouts of the world’s animals is not, in and of itself, a solution. We still have to use the information in the right way, and political and economic considerations often derail conservation. But if we want to protect animals, the more information we have about them and their habitats, the better. Plus, even Benson acknowledges that tracking devices have real benefits in another regard: public engagement. Tags that communicate with satellites allow scientists to broadcast the whereabouts of free-ranging animals online, in real time, for all of us to see, giving wild creatures their own pack of paparazzi. By providing closer encounters, even virtual ones, with other species, our electronic tools are bridging the divide between humans and animals.

TOPP researchers, for instance, conducted their own elephant seal tracking project and posted the seals’ whereabouts on a public website. There, an interactive map displayed each seal’s individual journey in the Pacific. I started checking in on the animals, cheering on the males as they traveled up the Pacific coast and worrying as the seal moms slid off into the dark night, abandoning their month-old pups for good. It was high drama on the high seas, and I devoured updates as if they were Facebook posts from my closest friends. (As luck would have it, the TOPP team set up Facebook accounts for some of its seals.)

I developed a particular soft spot for a loser male the researchers had named Jonathan Sealwart. The elephant seal, I learned, is at the bottom of the social totem pole and sleeps all alone on a California beach. He has no harem of admiring lady seals and may go his entire life without mating. He certainly can’t rely on his looks; he has what must be one of the world’s most hideous animal faces, with a droopy proboscis that appears to be melting off his face. To add insult to injury, Jon Sealwart has far fewer Facebook friends than the seal named after his late-night Comedy Central colleague, Stelephant Colbert.

TOPP isn’t alone; projects tracking everything from albatrosses to sea turtles have made the animal world accessible to us online at all hours of the day. “You see conservation organizations and scientists all trying to forge connections using these technologies,” Benson says, “to really give people insight into the everyday lives of nonhuman animals in a way that wasn’t possible before. That can be tremendously valuable.”

Even the act of assigning animals proper names—something that usually goes hand in hand with following the travels of specific individuals—can help us form emotional attachments to them. (Consider that pets are named but laboratory animals almost never are.) Thanks to proper names, I could do more than learn about the general characteristics of elephant seals; I could forge a bond with Mr. Sealwart, a specific seal with a unique history and personality. As Sune Borkfelt, a scholar at Denmark’s Aarhus University, wrote in a 2011 paper, “[G]iving an animal a name does often draw it closer to us.” Assigning names to individual animals can remind us that they are sentient subjects of their own lives, rather than mere objects, and it can highlight what we have in common with other species, rather than what sets us apart. Coming to know just a few wild individuals could prompt attachment and affection for an entire species and make us more invested in safeguarding their habitats and their futures. Tagging-and-tracking technology is helping us learn more about marine animals and the risks they face, simultaneously making us
want
to protect these creatures and giving us the knowledge we need to actually do so. Jonathan Sealwart may be a loser in the world of seals, but thanks to a little electronic device glued to his head, he’s got a gang of human friends—more than five hundred of them, according to Facebook—and we, at least, are rooting for him.

6. Pin the Tail on the Dolphin

Winter’s life began with a phenomenal stroke of bad luck.

In December 2005, when the Atlantic bottlenose dolphin was just a few months old, she was swimming with her mother in Mosquito Lagoon, along central Florida’s Atlantic coast. Somehow, she got herself tangled in a crab trap. An eagle-eyed fisherman spotted her struggling and called in a wildlife rescue team. They found the calf gasping for air, her heart racing. The volunteers gently positioned the dolphin on a stretcher, carried her out of the water, and drove her across the state to the Clearwater Marine Aquarium.

She was in bad shape when she arrived—exhausted, dehydrated, and sporting numerous cuts and abrasions. She could barely swim, and trainers stood in the tank with her, holding her little body up in the water. No one knew whether she’d make it through the night. But she was a survivor, lasting through those initial hours and the following days, too.

Slowly, with bottle feeding and round-the-clock care, the team nursed the calf back to health. As Winter began to stabilize, though, other problems emerged. A line from the crab trap had been wrapped so tightly around her tail that it had cut off the circulation. The tissue was necrotic: The dolphin’s skin started peeling off, and the tail itself began to decay. One day, Winter’s caretakers found two of her vertebrae at the bottom of her pool. Winter was getting her strength back, but her tail was clearly a goner. And what kind of future could there possibly be for a dolphin without a tail?

Though she didn’t know it, in one way, Winter was lucky—she was born in the twenty-first century, and there has never been a better time for an animal to lose a body part. Materials ranging from carbon-fiber composites to flexible, shape-shifting plastics are making it possible for us to design artificial appendages for patients that fly, trot, or swim; prosthetists have succeeded in creating a new beak for an eagle, a replacement shell for a turtle, and a false foot for a kangaroo. Surgical techniques are enabling vets to give cats and dogs bionic legs that are permanently implanted in their bodies, and advances in neuroscience hold out the promise of creating prostheses that can be directly controlled by the brain.

Whereas affixing sensors and tags to animal bodies could help save entire species, artificial tails and paws represent the other end of the spectrum, a way to provide a (sometimes literal) leg up to unlucky individuals. Prosthetic devices aren’t appropriate for every animal—indeed, one of the challenges prosthetists face is determining what’s in the best interest of bodies that look nothing like our own—but when we get it right, our custom-designed and individually engineered devices are helping us aid animals one life and limb at a time.

*   *   *

If there’s any place to begin an investigation into the power of animal prosthetics—and the challenges involved in creating them—it’s the Clearwater Marine Aquarium. Home to dolphins, stingrays, sea turtles, otters, and assorted other marine creatures, the facility is located on an island just off Florida’s Gulf coast. The bright blue building sits right at the harbor; on a sunny spring morning, a dozen small boats bob among the docks. Inside, cheesy but cheerful island music plays on an endless loop. A few stairs lead from the main lobby to an open-air deck, where two dolphins kibbitz around in a large tank. It’s easy to pick out Winter—instead of a long, full tail, she has a little curled stump that hangs off her torso like a comma.

Even with her abbreviated tail, Winter looks at home in the water, gliding and playing just like her fellow cetaceans. She’s adapted to her unique body by adopting some unusual swimming techniques. Dolphins typically use their pectoral fins for balance, but Winter “cheats” and uses hers as little oars. And without the pair of flukes that normally adorn the end of a dolphin’s tail, Winter lacks a dolphin’s normal system of propulsion. So she’s taught herself to swim like a fish, moving her body from side to side, rather than up and down, as dolphins normally do.

Unfortunately, this fish-like swimming posture puts pressure on Winter’s spine, causing it to curve unnaturally. And in the months after her rescue, Winter’s caretakers began to worry that her strange method of swimming would cause permanent injury. In September 2006, an aquarium official mentioned this concern in an interview with National Public Radio, which was airing a segment about Winter. A prosthetist named Kevin Carroll happened to be in his car, radio tuned to NPR, when the segment aired. As Carroll listened to Winter’s saga, he thought:
I could put a tail on that dolphin.
A prosthetic tail, Carroll believed, might prompt Winter to start swimming like a dolphin again and stave off a lifetime of disability.

Carroll grew up near a hospital in a small Irish town, and seeing the ailing and injured children come and go inspired an interest in fixing the human body. He trained in prosthetics in Dublin, visited the United States, and never left. Today, Carroll is the vice president of Hanger Prosthetics and Orthotics based in Austin, Texas, and one of the world’s leading prosthetists. He is constantly on the road, crisscrossing the country as he outfits injured patients with artificial limbs. He consulted on the case of Oscar Pistorius, the double-amputee sprinter from South Africa, has worked with world-class mountain climbers, and regularly watches his patients compete in the Paralympic Games.

Carroll’s main focus is on helping humans, but every once in a while, someone will walk into his clinic with a three-legged dog or a beakless bird and ask for his help. As an animal lover, Carroll finds himself unable to resist donating his weekends to the cause. Over the years, he has worked with his Hanger colleagues to make prostheses for a veritable menagerie of animals: dogs, ducks, sea turtles, “whatever comes our way,” he says. “I’ve sort of become the Dr. Doolittle of prosthetics.”

The aquarium agreed to let Carroll take a crack at a prosthetic dolphin tail, and he began assembling his team. He knew who he wanted for a partner: Dan Strzempka, a prosthetist in Hanger’s Sarasota office. Strzempka, who has worn a prosthetic leg since he was run over by a lawn mower at age four, is a Florida native with a passion for the ocean and the creatures that live there. But he wasn’t sure what to make of Carroll’s proposal to take on Winter as a patient. “At first, I thought he was joking,” Strzempka recalls. “Or I thought he was crazy.” As soon as he realized that Carroll was serious, Strzempka decided he was up for the challenge. One way or another, the men would give that little dolphin a tail.

Carroll and Strzempka have agreed to meet me at the aquarium and walk me through how they tackled the task. They are an odd pair; Carroll is slight and cue-ball bald, with a white beard, while Strzempka is tall, tanned, and solidly built. The staff beam when they see the prosthetists arrive, embracing them like family, and we slowly make our way to Winter’s pool, stopping to greet more people every few feet. When we finally get to the dolphin tank, Strzempka leans up against the railing and calls to Winter: “Hey, girl! What’s up, buddy?”

“Good marnin’!” Carroll shouts out to her in his Irish brogue.

Over the past five years, the men have spent countless hours standing here beside this tank. Winter is unlike any other patient they’d ever treated before, so their first task was understanding her body. Carroll and Strzempka began a crash course in dolphins, reading up on their anatomy and physiology and watching slow-motion videos of the cetaceans swimming to understand their biomechanics. Though animal prosthetists can draw upon human medicine, success often requires a degree of ingenuity; knowing how to build a leg for a human amputee won’t get you far if you want to replace an elephant’s missing foot or outfit a dog with a faux paw. So prosthetists often find themselves MacGyvering each animal appendage, custom designing and individually engineering it. Sometimes they end up inventing materials or techniques that have never been used in prostheses before.

In Winter’s case, the basic plan seemed easy enough—Carroll and Strzempka decided to create a plastic tail that would slip over what remained of Winter’s peduncle, the muscular back half of a dolphin’s body that normally runs from the dorsal fin to the tail flukes. The challenge, they realized, would be figuring out how to keep the prosthesis on. Winter would be putting an incredible amount of force on the tail while swimming, but she wouldn’t be pressing the entire weight of her body into it, as a human does with a prosthetic leg. “Water,” Strzempka reminds me, “is a totally different environment.” What’s more, dolphin skin is slippery, sensitive, and delicate—and very easily injured.

Human amputees commonly use soft liners to cushion their stumps and shield their skin, and Carroll and Strzempka decided that Winter would need something similar. But the standard human liner wouldn’t do—for Winter, they’d have to create a brand-new material, soft enough to protect her skin, sticky enough to stay put on a slick surface, and strong enough to withstand daily use and abuse in a tank full of salt water.