Unstoppable by Nancy Furstinger

Author:Nancy Furstinger [Furstinger, Nancy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: gnv64
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

MR. STUBBS TEMPORARILY USES AN ORANGE FLOATIE TO TEACH HIM TO SWIM WITH HIS NEW TAIL.

Fortunately, Mr. Stubbs’s story made waves. The gator got a second chance when the Phoenix Herpetological Society rescued him. There, the society president Russ Johnson and his staff gave the formerly bullied reptile special attention so he wouldn’t always be last in the chow line. When it came time to swim, Russ recalled that Mr. Stubbs helplessly turned upside down and capsized, so he taught the alligator how to doggy paddle using his front legs. However, since “the tail is the main source of locomotion,” Russ witnessed how the alligator could not swim “swiftly and naturally.”

Mr. Stubbs needed a tail to turn his life around. In order to keep his body balanced, the tail would have to be designed with perfect proportions so that the growing gator would be able to move in the water and on land. A dream team of scientists, doctors for humans, and researchers tackled the challenge of fitting Mr. Stubbs with the world’s first prosthetic alligator tail.

A bit of movie magic started the process. Dr. Justin Georgi of Midwestern University stuck reflective dots all over Mr. Stubbs. Then he used special infrared video cameras to track the gator’s motion as he walked. This was “the same type of system that movie studios use to record the movements of actors for 3D digital special effects,” Justin said.

Computer data from the camera sessions showed that most of Mr. Stubbs’s problems “were related to improper posture. His hips were too high off the ground because his back legs were pushing with enough strength to carry a big, heavy tail, but the tail wasn’t there, so his legs were pushing too much and in the wrong directions,” Justin said. The weight of the prosthetic tail would be crucial, allowing the alligator’s strong back legs to support “the right amount of body.”

More movie magic helped a team design the perfect tail in multiple steps. First, Dr. Marc Jacofsky of the CORE Institute, a center for orthopedic research, took a mold of Mr. Stubbs’s rear using flexible silicone, called Body Double, which the movie industry uses to create such special effects as masks and creatures’ faces. Then he made an exact copy of the alligator’s rear and designed a socket to fit his stump. “Making a mold was easier to work with than having a live alligator in the lab!” Marc said. Next, he found an alligator carcass with a tail that was approximately the correct size for Mr. Stubbs, and he made a replica using Dragon Skin, a soft yet super-strong silicone rubber that special effects artists use to create zombie makeup. Finally, Marc connected the donor tail copy to the socket and harnessed it to the alligator’s rear legs. Success—Mr. Stubbs finally had his tail!

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