This new aerial survey of the New England area shows that the gray seal population is making a huge comeback.
Using drone footage, thermal cameras, and images from Google Earth, scientists at Duke University have found that there are now twice as many gray seals than originally thought in the Cape Cop, Martha’s Vineyard, and Nantucket area.
“Past surveys based on traditional methods of counting, using occupied aircraft to survey seals on beaches, islands and seasonal ice cover, counted about 15,000 seals off the southeastern Massachusetts coast,” said David W. Johnston, assistant professor at Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environment.
“Our technology-aided aerial survey, which used Google Earth imagery in conjunction with telemetry data from tagged animals, suggests the number is much larger – between 30,000 and 50,000. This is a conservation success that should be celebrated,” he added.
Gray seals were popular hunting prey up until the Marine Mammal Protection Act was passed in the early 70s. As their numbers started to recover, scientists found it incredibly difficult to count the marine mammals due to their ability to camouflage into their environment.
With thermal imaging technology, however, cameras can detect the heat signature of the seals, rather than depending on pure vision alone.
“Seal pups are born with a white coat, which makes them hard to see against ice or snow using traditional imagery,” said Alex Seymour, the study’s lead researcher. “But they can’t hide from thermal imagery.”
(WATCH the video below)
Click To Share This Sweet Story With Your Friends(Photo by Wilfbuck, CC)
In recognition of the life-saving treatment he received several months ago, an anonymous top Palestinian official has just made a massive donation of tens of thousands of shekels to an Israeli hospital.
The official of the Palestinian Authority, a man in his 40s known only as M, had been hospitalized at Rambam Medical Center in Haifa for a cancerous tumor earlier this year. As he was there, he was struck by how the hospital’s staff treated Palestinians and Israelis with equal attention, compassion, and diligence.
He was also moved by the amount of children who were residents from Gaza and the West Bank.
“When I arrived at Rambam, I saw a medical team that treats its patients with dedication, but I also saw the suffering of sick children,” said M, according to a statement. “Palestinian children, Israelis, Syrians, and children from other countries who are being treated at Rambam for serious illnesses and are in need of all the help they can get.
“I decided to make a donation to help save human lives apart from any political considerations.
“Both Israeli and Palestinian societies suffer from violence and I am striving for a situation where we all can contribute to peace and health: to treat children, save lives, share knowledge, and train Palestinian doctors at Rambam, in order to improve the state of the health systems and the capacity to treat people in the PA areas, and to encourage others to donate and contribute to the betterment of health within our two nations.”
“Medicine is a bridge between peoples and my hope is that with the help of this small contribution and others like it in the future, we will all see a better tomorrow,” M added.
M’s donation will go towards the construction of a new recovery room for children undergoing chemotherapy in the .
Click To Share The Inspiring News With Your Friends(Photo by Moshe Shai/Flash90)
Jerry Garcia passed away 22 years ago, but the legacy of the lead singer of the Grateful Dead lives on in a new effort to boost wild honeybee and monarch butterfly populations.
Embarking on a summer tour across America, Dead & Company, the group headed by former Garcia bandmates Bob Weir, Mickey Hart, and Bill Kreutzmann (with special guest John Mayer), will give fans at each venue a way in which they can help repopulate the winged creatures.
The band will be hosting a charity outreach program in the form of Participation Row: a series of tents dedicated to presenting meaningful causes and organizations. One of the tents will feature the most recent work of the Jerry Garcia Foundation.
To encourage butterfly and bee conservation among Deadheads, the Foundation will be passing out free milkweed seeds and garden pollinator packs to the first 300 concert-goers to visit their tent at the venues, courtesy of the Save Our Monarchs Foundation.
Anyone who actually ends up planting the seeds can participate in an interactive art project by submitting photos of the blossoming garden to the foundation’s Facebook page with the tags #SaveTheMonarchs, #SaveTheBees, or #RippleEffect.
“Save Our Monarchs has generously donated thousands of Non-GMO milkweed seed packets and pollinator garden seeds,” said Keelin Garcia, Jerry’s youngest daughter and co-founder of the Jerry Garcia Foundation. “We are sharing these seeds in hopes that gardens will be planted to nourish butterfly and bee populations across the US.”
The initiative comes at an appropriate time, too. Garcia’s birthday is coming up on August 9th, and the program supports a cause that would have been very dear to him. Additionally, National Pollinator Week is running from June 19th-25th.
The Garcia foundation has already donated several of the singer’s colorful art pieces to benefit Save Our Monarchs and the urban beekeeping organization Honey Love.
“Jerry was an environmentalist who advocated for the preservation of the rainforests and the coral reefs,” said Manasha Garcia, Jerry’s wife and co-founder of the foundation. “It is a blessing to continue this work in his honor.”
Encourage The #RippleEffect: Click To Keep This Story Truckin’ – OR, (Photos by the Jerry Garcia Foundation)
Thanks to a progressive move announced by Facebook last week, video content has now been made available to over 360 million people worldwide.
That’s because the social media giant has just made it so that Facebook Live videos can now feature closed captioning for the deaf and hard of hearing, 30 million of which live in America alone.
Regular Facebook videos have been able to feature closed captioning since 2014, however with 20% of Facebook video content now being broadcasted through the live feature, the deaf community has been unable to participate in that category of content since it launched in 2016.
Facebook officials have even found that a large majority of viewers who aren’t hard of hearing simply enjoy closed captioning for other reasons.
“Making Facebook accessible to everyone is a key part of building global community. Today we’re allowing publishers to include closed captions in Facebook Live, helping people who are deaf or hard of hearing to experience live videos,” wrote Facebook representatives last week. “Today’s milestone represents the next step in our efforts to make content on Facebook accessible to more people.”
This sympathetic police officer wasn’t about to punish a driver for making safe decisions.
Officer Jim Hellrood was making his rounds for parking control on Thursday morning in Wausau, Wisconsin when he found a car that had stayed overnight in a metered lot.
As he was about to issue a ticket to the car, however, he noticed a handwritten note in the windshield.
The note read: “Please take pity on me. I walked home… safe choices.” The words were followed by a little smiley face.
As it turns out, the plea for sympathy worked. In response to the endearing note, the officer simply printed out a warning saying: “Pity Granted, Just A Warning”.
“Parking Control Officer Jim Hellrood can appreciate people making safe choices, and a good sense of humor,” wrote the Wausau Police Department. “That’s why he recently issued a warning to a vehicle left in a metered lot overnight. Thanks to this resident for sharing!”
The police department has since explained that the law enforcement team is more than happy to show more leeway towards any drivers who choose not to drive home after a night of drinking. Though the unidentified driver did not mention it explicitly, the parking officer inferred from the note that they opted to accept a parking ticket rather than drink and drive.
Click To Share This Sweet Story With Your Friends (Photo by the Wausau Police Department)
This engineer has come up with an awe-inspiring method of providing freshwater to his village during the dry season.
Sonam Wangchuck is an engineer who lives in Ladakh: a village that sits 11,500 feet up in the southern Himalayas.
Since the village depends on mountain glacial runoff as their primary source of freshwater, Ladakh struggles with drought in the springtime. Combined with the effects of climate change, the region has often been at the mercy of nature.
That is, until Sonam created the village’s first ice stupa – also known as an ice pyramid, or an artificial glacier.
Sonam created a pipeline that ran from the freshwater sources over a mile up in the mountains, all the way down to the village. During the winter, the pipeline would pour gallons of water into a kind of stationary sprinkler system. As the water was sprayed into the 0 degree Fahrenheit air, it would eventually keep building and freezing on top of itself until it made a pyramid.
Because large volumes of ice melt more slowly if it is a part of a smaller surface area, the pyramid was able to provide Ladakh with over 1.5 million liters of freshwater through the dry spring months up until late July.
In 2015, Ladakhi villagers were able to plant over 5,000 saplings using water from the ice stupa, resulting in the creation of a desert oasis capable of surviving all weather conditions.
Thanks to the innovation of his design, Sonam was a 2016 Rolex Award laureate. The engineer plans on using his $100,000 cash prize to establish a tree-planting program with the addition of 20 more stupas in Ladakh, thus providing over 10 million more liters of freshwater to the village.
(WATCH the video below)
Click To Share This Cool Story With Your Friends (Photo by the Rolex Awards)
It may be a lifeguard’s job to keep a watchful eye over the lives of swimmers, but this teen wasn’t expecting to save a life within minutes of being put on the job.
15-year-old Jack Viglianco had just started his first shift as a lifeguard at the Charles A. Foster pool in Lakewood, Ohio last Thursday when – after only being on the clock for 20 minutes – he heard a cry for help.
A 4-year-old boy who had been on a summer camp outing had accidentally moved into the deep end of the pool when he started struggling to keep his head above water.
As he splashed around in desperation, Jack leapt into action, jumping into the pool and helping the boy to safety.
And just like that, the teen was a hero.
“I was realizing that I just saved a kid’s life,” Jack told WJW. “And that is something not many other people can say. Nothing my friends have ever said.”
According to pool workers, lifeguards are a hugely necessary part of the facility; during last summer alone, there were over 42 incidents of people starting to drown. All were saved thanks to the lifeguards on duty.
(WATCH the video below)
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As summer temperatures soar in the south, these police officers weren’t about to let a WWII veteran soak in his own sweat all day.
The Fort Worth Police Department in Texas received a 911 call from a 95-year-old man distressed over his broken air conditioner. Though it wasn’t exactly considered an emergency, two boys in blue dropped by the senior’s house to check out the situation.
Officers William Margolis and Christopher Weir drove over to Julius Hatley’s house where the senior was sitting out in the shade of his porch in the early morning 90-degree heat.
Not only was Hatley’s air conditioner broken, but his central air conditioning was broken as well. Heartbroken by Hatley’s sweltering situation, Margolis promised to return with a solution.
The officers then went to Home Depot and asked the employees which unit would be best for Hatley’s house. The store employees were so touched upon hearing about the veteran’s situation, however, that they decided to throw down $150 of their own money so they could split the cost of an air conditioner with Margolis.
The officers then brought the unit back to Hatley’s house with another coworker so they could make sure it was properly installed.
“This is what being an officer is about,” Weir’s wife wrote on Facebook. “This is what the media doesn’t report on but happens every single day by officers all over.”
“He was actually really excited,” Margolis told CBS News. “He said he knew if he needed help to call 911 and we actually were able to help him, so he was really excited about it.”
Additionally, since the story of the officers’ good deed has spread on social media, a repair company has offered to fix Hatley’s central air conditioning free of charge.
The officers plan on continuing to assist Hatley by repainting his house, installing new windows, and distributing a weekly supply of groceries to his house.
(WATCH the video below)
Protect Your Friends From Negativity: Click To Serve This Story Instead – OR,
The kids in this Catholic school class learned plenty about history, math, and science this year – but most importantly, they learned about kindness, unity, and love.
Owen Guertin of Carondelet Catholic School in Minneapolis, Minnesota was diagnosed with an arteriovenous malformation in November: a condition in which the blood vessels in the 4th grader’s brain were tangled. If the malformation is left untreated, the vessels can rupture, causing death.
Though Owen’s parents were understandably devastated – as the boy’s cousin recently passed away from the same condition – Owen’s classmates and teacher in room 101 were also upset.
As the boy prepared for surgery at the Boston Children’s Hospital, his fellow students missed his presence in the classroom. Every day, Owen’s favorite teddy bear dressed in the Catholic school uniform would be dropped off at school to save his owner’s seat, providing comfort to the classmates.
Then, one day, the room 101 teacher Kristen Rafferty was reading an excerpt from Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes by Eleanor Coerr, a book about a young woman with leukemia on a mission to fold over 1,000 paper cranes. One of her students piped up in response, asking if the class could fold 1,000 paper cranes for Owen.
Rafferty was more than happy to encourage the mission, allowing the children to fold cranes during recess, lunch, and prayer time. The kids felt that even though their collection of birds may be made out of paper, they would still help Owen recover from his surgery.
“I just knew the more we made the more Owen would heal, I didn’t want to stop because I wanted him to get better,” 4th grader Adie Scheel told KARE11.
By the time Owen was in recovery from a successful 17-hour surgery, room 101 was adorned with a “crane-bow”: hundreds of tiny origami birds hanging from the ceiling in big rainbow bunches.
When the boy returned to the classroom on Valentine’s Day, he was welcomed back with an emotional greeting.
(WATCH the video below)
Click To Share This Crane-tastic Story With Your Friends – Photo by Joanie Witberler
A 12-year-old girl is being hailed as a hero after she used a first aid technique that she learned from reading The Hunger Games series to help treat her friend’s leg injury.
Megan Gething, Mackenzie George, and several of their other friends were playing in a Gloucester, Massachusetts marsh on Saturday morning when Mackenzie slipped through the mud and slashed her leg open on a piece of steel.
The wound, which was about 10 inches long and 3 inches wide, started bleeding profusely, sending the youngsters into a state of panic – except for Megan.
Remembering a scene in the Suzanne Collins novel, Megan quickly requested a pair of her friend’s shorts so she could tie a tourniquet on Mackenzie’s leg. As she applied pressure on the tourniquet, she calmly told one of the other teens to run and get help.
“I knew it from a book I read,” she told the Gloucester Times, referencing the young adult book series. “I figured it was a well-known method of stopping bleeding.”
Mackenzie’s family members arrived a few minutes later and carried the injured youth back to their home where she was taken to the local hospital. She then underwent surgery to make sure that there was no bacteria in the wound. Since the injury caused no nerve or muscle damage, Mackenzie is expected to make a full recovery by the end of the month.
Paramedics say that the situation could have been much worse if Mackenzie had continued to lose blood – and it’s all thanks to Megan’s quick-thinking under pressure.
“Megan was the star of the show. Thank goodness she was there. Mackenzie would have lost a lot more blood, and it could have been life-threatening if she hadn’t done what she did,” the youth’s father told the Gloucester Times.
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Finland’s capital city of Helsinki is celebrating its 75th summer of serving hot free meals to their young residents at public playgrounds.
The city’s 71 public parks and playgrounds have consistently served nutritious meals to kids ages 1 to 16.
Thanks to the funding from the Helsinki Social Services Department, hot meals and drinks have been distributed to the children every summer weekday at noon since 1942.
Since most of the kids have parents who are at work during the day, the parks and playgrounds provide a valuable space for them to play.
Additionally, volunteers, mothers, and works supervise the children with games, activities, singing, and dancing, which creates a tangible community spirit amongst the youngsters.
If this photo proves anything, it’s that this teenager and her dad are just as close as they were 13 years ago.
The photos depict a 5-year-old Brittany Gayler being walked to her first day of kindergarten by her father – and then again as an 18-year-old going to her last day of high school.
Brittany, who is a senior at Alvord High School in Alvord, Texas, says that it was a “bittersweet” moment that she’ll “remember forever.”
Her father, 38-year-old Jason Gayler, says that he was pretty choked up over the emotional flashback and the amount of praise that he received for his parenting skills on social media.
“It has been a bit shocking with a mix of happiness,’” Jason told TODAY about the overwhelming online response to the photo comparison. “It brings me great joy if we were able to help people think back to that time, even if just for a brief moment, and smile. I can hope one day when I’m old I can look back at this and smile!”
(WATCH the video below)
Click To Share This Dad-tastic Story With Your Friends (Photo by Brittany Gayler)
Homeless men are finding peace and purpose through their care of local beehives in Montreal.
Accueil Bonneau, a shelter and homeless care center based out of the Canadian city, has discovered the rewarding effects of teaching their residents about urban beekeeping.
Because of a now 4-year partnership with beekeeping company Alvéole, dozens of homeless Canadians have successfully reintegrated back into society thanks to the social and professional skills that they learned through the program.
Over 60 hives across seven locations within the city are cared for be homeless bee apprentices. The honey is then harvested and sold at participating Metro supermarkets. The money raised from the honey helps fund the program and provides small payments to the homeless apprentices, according to CBC.
Due to the careful handling of the bees, the participants learn to be more calm and gentle, which creates “therapeutic” feelings of ease.
“Survival of bees is important to me,” said program participant Roger Décarie. “Often mistaken for wasps that are more aggressive, they are maltreated and killed. Without the bees, there would be no flowers, no trees, nature would not be the same. We need to take care of them, just like they take care of us, and I am proud to contribute to that.”
“Montreal’s community takes care of l’Accueil. L’Accueil takes care of ‘the guys’. ‘The guys’ take care of the bees. And the bees take care of life… What wonderful interconnectedness!” says Aubin Boudreau, executive director Accueil Bonneau.
A 2-year-old boy may not be alive today if it weren’t for the concerted efforts of another child’s parents wanting to save other kids from the dangers of “dry drowning”.
Six days after 4-year-old Frankie Delgado went swimming with his parents for Memorial Day, he reportedly started suffering from fever and stomach aches. His condition worsened until he was eventually rushed to the hospital where he later passed away.
Doctors later informed Frankie’s parents that their son was a victim of dry drowning, also known as secondary drowning: a condition that mostly affects children.
The condition typically occurs when a child inhales water, and the fluid gets trapped in the child’s body. The liquid then causes the vocal chords to spasm and constrict until they restrict the body’s airway.
Though the Texan family was understandably devastated, they took to social media to spread awareness of their late son’s condition.
One person in particular who saw the Delgado’s warning was Staff Sgt. Garon Vega of Colorado who later recognized the same symptoms in his son Gio after the family went swimming at a community pool. Garon and his wife took Gio to the hospital were doctors conducted an X-ray of the 2-year-old’s lungs.
The boy had indeed swallowed a small amount of water, which – if gone untreated – could have caused his death.
“I feel like I needed to reach out to the parents of little Frankie and tell them, I don’t know how to word it, but their little boy saved our little boy’s life,” Garon told ABC 13. “’It was an unfortunate thing that happened, but if I had not told my wife that he swallowed the water, and if she had not seen that article, I think we would’ve ended up dispelling it as a regular sickness.”
A GoFundMe page has already raised $45,000 to cover Frankie’s funeral expenses.
Click To Share The Inspiring News With Your Friends (Photo by the Delgado family)
Following their 2017 general election, the UK now plays host to the most diverse panel of MPs (Members of Parliament) in history by inducting more women, openly LGBT and non-white members than ever before.
For starters, 10 new MPs of ethnic backgrounds were elected, including the Labour party’s Preet Gill, Parliament’s first female Sikh, and Tanmanjeet Singh, the first turban-wearing Sikh MP. This brings the total of non-white MPs to 51.
Additionally, seventeen women were elected as MPs, four which are black. This brings the total amount of female MPs to 208, with women making up about 45% of the Labour party and 21% of the Conservative party.
The amount of openly LGBT MPs has risen from 32 to 43 since 2015 – a 40% increase.
Then, according to the BBC, 2 more MPs with disabilities have joined the Labor party: Marsha de Cordova, who is blind, and Jared O’Mara, who has cerebral palsy hemiparesis.
“Better representation is a test of the quality of our democracy and one that is particularly urgent given the increased engagement of young people – a group that is not only more diverse but also expects discrimination of whatever kind to be combatted,” Omar Khan, director of race equality charity Runnymede Trust, told The Independent.
Diversify The News: Click To Share With Your Friends (Photo by CLLR Tony Belton-Conservative Party)
This groundbreaking new drug for cancer treatment was immediately approved by the FDA in light of its revolutionary effects on tumors across the body.
The drug, known as pembrolizumab (brand name Keytruda), is the first cancer treatment that can be used against 11 different kinds of cancers no matter their location; whether in the bone, colon, pancreas, brain, or lung, as long as the tumor has certain bio-markers.
Over the course of a 3-year medical trial, 86 patients who were suffering from advanced diseases that were resistant to all treatments were given pembrolizumab. All of the patients had already undergone several other types of therapy without any success.
By the end of the trial, 66 patients experienced dramatic tumor size reduction, while the tumors in 18 of the patients disappeared altogether without any sign of returning.
Many of these advanced types of cancer work by shielding themselves from the proteins that the immune system uses to detect and fight diseases. Pembrolizumab, however, is an example of an immunotherapy drug called a PD-1 blocker. These drugs detect tumors by their genetic code so that they can reveal them to the immune system, which can then work against them accordingly.
While the specific genetic code that pembrolizumab targets isn’t very common, the drug could still save over 60,000 Americans from rare cancers every year.
The researchers at Johns Hopkins Medicine first stumbled upon the genetic treasure chest years ago when a clinical trial of over a dozen patients were treated with an immunotherapy drug – none of them showed any kind of response, except for one, whose cancer disappeared altogether.
When researchers looked at the tumor’s genetics, they found a specific mutation that matched several other types of cancers. This led them to developing the drug that targeted the mutation: pembrolizumab.
“This was the eureka moment that led us to develop this clinical trial,” says Bert Vogelstein, co-director of the Ludwig Center at the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center and the Genetics Program of the Bloomberg-Kimmel Institute.
The impact of positive and negative emotions might be more impactful than you think—and more persuasive.
A teacher in Curitiba, a southern region in Brazil, decided to illustrate the power of words to her students by using two cups of sealed rice.
Physical education teacher Ana Paula Frezatto Martins arranged the class in a circle around the two cups of grains. Then, she asked the students to say bad things to one of the cups — things people might hear in everyday life, like “you are useless”, “you are stupid”, and “you can’t accomplish anything”.
To the second glass, the teacher asked the kids to say things they would like to hear from everyone. The kids used such expressions as “you are special”, “you can accomplish anything”, and “you are smart”. Days later, the rice in the “love cup” fermented naturally while the rice in the “hate cup” became dark and moldy.
Martins says she has always tried to show her students the importance of highlighting positivity.
“In my classes I explain the importance of saying nice things to each other, but kids need more tangible physical expressions of our examples,” says Martins, according to Globo.
“When you say something nice, like ‘you can do it’, you feel that in your heart,” says 10-year-old student Anita Santini Trevisan. The youngster says that because of the experiment, she has tried to be more positive every day.
Another student, Henrique Kloster, had a similar conclusion: “The damage of negativity is bigger than we can imagine … there are two ways to say things, the right way is to praise the good side of others with the eyes of the heart, not the eyes we see.”
The rice experiment mirrors a famous one conducted by Masaro Emoto who tested distilled water and natural water when it was frozen into crystals to see what would happen when they were exposed to different human emotional energy, in the form of words, pictures, thoughts and music — for instance, heavy metal music versus classical. He then observed the crystals under a microscope.
“In all of these experiments,” he wrote on his website, “the result was that we always observed beautiful crystals after giving good words, playing good music, and showing, playing, or offering prayer to water. On the other hand, we observed disfigured crystals in the opposite situation.”
He published these results as a photographic collection, entitled “Messages from Water (1999)”. The photos have been viewed by millions, and used in films, like the one below.
He also did a similar experiment on jars of cooked rice. As you can see in the video below, the rice stayed productive and pure when it was appreciated, but the rice that was either hated or ignored, turned black and moldy.
The rice experiment has been undertaken by others who recorded on video the same results, and shared them on YouTube.
It makes us want to pay more attention to the words and emotions we are displaying toward others every day.
MULTIPLY the Positive by Sharing the Notion With Your Friends (Images via YouTube)
A heroic 39-year-old didn’t hesitate to jump into the window of a moving car in order to assist a random driver suffering from a seizure.
The endangered driver first caught the attention of police, and the local Dixon, Illinois man Randy Tompkins, when his car started rolling through traffic onto the wrong side of the road.
Tompkins stopped his truck, ran towards the convulsing man’s car, leapt through the passenger-side window of the driver’s moving car, and brought the vehicle to a halt.
After years of financial distress and struggle, the Brazilian economy grew by 1%, according to government agencies.
During the first three months of 2017, the Brazilian GDP grew by 1% as compared to the two previous years. This translates to an increase of nearly $500 billion dollars in production of goods and services.
The Gross Domestic Product (GDP) represents the total value of all goods and services produced over a specific time period, indicating the size and evolution of a country’s economy.
These numbers might not seem like much, but there is a lot to celebrate when putting the context into perspective. Between 2015 and 2016, the Brazilian economy shrank by about 4% each year. The period has since been called the worst recession in the history of the country.
Now, with output increasing, 2017’s growth technically removes Brazil from the recession.
Indicators show that the main explanation for the expansion was agriculture. Brazil experienced the greatest improvement of field and farming production in 20 years. The harvest of grains was vital in creating the economic growth, as it was the biggest expansion since the 4th quarter of 1996. While this is cause for celebration, specialists say that other sectors of Brazilian employment need to improve in order for the nation to fully recover from the recession.
Dr. Carolina Medina, SFWC volunteer (Red)
Gopher tortoises
Electro-acupuncture therapy
Though this wildlife center cares for thousands of animals every year, this is the first time they have ever used acupuncture on a patient.
The special case was a 10-year-old gopher tortoise that was found on the side of the road with a deep crack in her shell and no motor control left in her back legs.
The South Florida Wildlife Center (SFWC) took the tortoise into their care and started a life-saving treatment of “electro-acupuncture”: a therapy that connects electrical leads to acupuncture needles with the goal of improving the stimulation of damaged nerves through mild electrical currents.
Their efforts paid off within just a week in April, as she regained movement in her back legs. One month later, the tortoise was wandering around her outdoor enclosure and munching on tasty grass shoots.
A threatened species in Florida, gopher tortoises make their homes by burrowing into the dirt. To ensure this particular patient’s survival, the final step is waiting until she regains her digging abilities before releasing her back into the wild.
The tortoise was a perfect example of SFWC’s promotion of the One Health concept, which recognizes that each individual species is linked to the survival of every other.
“Gopher tortoises are a keystone species,” said the Humane Society of the United State’s senior director Debra Parsons-Drake. “The burrows they dig are essential to the survival of hundreds of other species who use them for safety and shelter.
“By saving this one animal, we are not only benefitting her, but positively affecting the environment in which we all co-exist.”
Dr. Carolina Medina, SFWC volunteer, gopher tortoises, electro-acupuncture therapy
Click To Share This Cool Rescue With Your Friends – Photos by Jesus Aranguren/AP Images for HSUS
