The baby bottlenose dolphin -- dubbed Winter -- lost her tail, but maybe her life could be saved.

"How could somebody be this stupid?" said McCulloch, director of dolphin and whale research at Florida's Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institution. "The first thing is the anger. The next thing you do is channel that anger into a solution."

The solution for Winter may be a prosthetic tail. If the logistics can be worked out, Winter's prosthesis would be the first for a dolphin who lost its tail and the key joint that allows it to move in powerful up and down strokes. Another dolphin in Japan has a prosthesis, the first in the world, to replace a missing part of its tail.

"There's never been a dolphin like her. It's a learning experience for all of us," said Dana Zucker, chief operating officer of the Clearwater Marine Aquarium. The nonprofit marine animal rescue center is now Winter's permanent home.

Winter was a frail, dehydrated 3-month-old when she came to the hospital in December. A fisherman found her tangled in the buoy line of a crab trap in Indian River Lagoon near Cape Canaveral. Marine biologists and crab fisherman had worked out an easy fix years ago to keep dolphins from eating bait out of crab traps, but this trap didn't have it. Winter got tangled in the buoy line. It tightened around her tail as she frantically tried to swim away, strangling the blood supply to her tail flukes.

"It looked like paper," Zucker said of Winter's tail. "Bit by bit over the weeks it just fell off."

Winter was left with a rounded stump. A team of more than 150 volunteers and veterinarians spent more than four months nursing Winter back to health in four-hour shifts, around the clock. Zucker and her family spent many nights cuddling with Winter and feeding her a special mix of infant formula and pureed fish in the aquarium's rescue pool.

"Dolphins are very social," Zucker said. "Without the people 24 hours a day, she was lost."

Winter learned how to swim without her tail -- 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.

In the tank, she swims and plays with her adult dolphin companion, Panama, rolling and diving and surfacing to demand belly rubs and fish from her caretakers. She's been known to greet visitors with a playful squirt of fishy saltwater.

"She is such a dollface," Zucker said. "She brightens my day."

Without a tail, Winter can't keep up with wild dolphins who can swim up to 25 mph with strokes of their tail flukes. She will be a permanent resident at the Clearwater Marine Aquarium, even if they can get her a prosthetic tail.

Zucker has formed a team to discuss the prospects of designing a tail for Winter. They've been consulting with a major diving gear manufacturer, a tire company and the U.S. Navy, which has experience attaching things to dolphins for military research.

It's uncharted territory. Fuji, an elderly dolphin who lives at an aquarium in Okinawa, had part of his tail remaining on which to attach a prosthesis.

Winter doesn't. Both her tail flukes and peduncle, a wrist-like joint that allows a dolphin tail to move up and down, were lost to necrosis. It is not clear yet how the tail will be attached to Winter's tail stump. The prosthetic tail also will need to be tough.

"The dolphin's tail fin is the most powerful swimming mechanism Mother Nature ever designed," McCulloch said. "When you see how much pressure they put on their flukes, the prosthesis is going to take a marvel of modern engineering."

Veterinarians are also unsure if a prosthesis will be beneficial or harmful in the long term. Swimming without a tail may also ultimately wear on Winter's spine.

"We haven't seen it before because we haven't had a dolphin without a tail before," McCulloch said. "It's an interesting anatomical challenge."

Winter will need at least three tails as she grows. She is now about 4 feet long and weighs 110 pounds. When she is full grown at age 15, Winter will be twice as long and four times as heavy. The final unknown is cost.

"All I know is Fuji's tail cost $100,000 -- and that was in 2004," McCulloch said.

That's equal to the entire monthly operating budget of the Clearwater Marine Aquarium, Zucker said. The small animal hospital is no Sea World. It relies mostly on volunteer workers. The roof leaks in heavy rains.

"We're a mom and pop shop," Zucker said. "It's a labor of love."

Zucker expects the design cost of the tail will be underwritten by the company that creates it. It's the costs of long term care of Winter -- and the other injured dolphins, turtles and sea otters in her care -- that keep her up at night.

Winter is a living reminder for humans to be careful about what they leave in the water. Her neighbors at the aquarium include sea turtles who lost flippers to abandoned fishing line or got their shells cracked by boat propellers.

"Dolphins are the megaphone," McCulloch said. "They've got the most charisma. The kids get it right away. It's the adults, more creatures of habit, who take more persuasion. You can't outlaw fishing line, but you can educate a fisherman not to use careless techniques such as tossing out line.

"The best thing we can do is this business is put ourselves out of business," McCulloch said. "Unfortunately, that's not going to happen in our lifetime."

Zucker has stocked the aquarium gift shop with Winter products, including hats, T-shirts and a plush, tailless stuffed dolphin with "Winter" stitched in its side. The plush Winter costs $19.95.

"People say I'm going commercial," Zucker said. "I'm not. My kids didn't even get Sesame Street stuff when they were growing up. It's selling the cause. We're educating any way we can."

Associated Press