Turtle gets crawling with aid from Lego wheelchair
Sask. student thinks outside the shell in recovery effort for vulnerable species
SASKATOON When a turtle with a shattered shell was brought into the Maryland Zoo this summer, a student from the University of Saskatchewan’s veterinary college was tasked with making sure the critter could still get around while it healed.
His solution? Build a tiny wheelchair — out of Lego.
“One of the cool things about veterinary medicine — and especially zoo veterinary medicine — is this idea of resourcefulness,” said Garrett Fraess, a fourth-year student at the Western College of Veterinary Medicine who spent nine weeks doing a clinical rotation at the Maryland Zoo this summer.
“Our patients can’t tell us what’s wrong, our patients can’t always tell us how they feel and sometimes you have to just think outside the box ... I was just thinking: What can we do? There’s got to be something. And, if we can just be resourceful enough, we can give this turtle the best prognosis we can.”
Eastern box turtles are often found near the Maryland Zoo; the organization runs a monitoring project for the vulnerable species. People who see the slow-moving animals can bring them to the zoo and staff will tag and release them as part of efforts to understand more about their range, health and lifespan. The zoo also treats and rehabilitates injured animals.
That’s how Stephen the turtle ended up at the zoo. (“I don’t know that it’s always the best idea to name wildlife because they should always be treated as wild animals, but we were calling him Stephen,” Fraess says).
When Stephen was brought to staff at the Maryland Zoo, the bottom part of his shell was broken into six pieces. Veterinarians performed surgery on the grapefruitsized reptile to bring the delicate fragments of his shell together.
Turtles have lower metabolic rates than people and heal slowly, so veterinarians needed to figure out a long-term solution to keep Stephen from dragging his shell on the ground until all the fragments healed — which could take as long as a year.
Fraess said he first tried making devices out of bits of surgical and maintenance equipment, but nothing was working as well as he wanted. He needed something light and customizable that would allow Stephen to move.
It had to be Lego.
Fraess contacted a friend who is a Lego enthusiast and they worked together to come up with a design that would work — one that includes multicoloured plastic pieces, four Lego wheels and globs of plumber’s putty. The Lego wheelchair can be adjusted over time, with pieces removed as it becomes safer for Stephen to put more weight on the underside of his shell. It’s almost like turtle physiotherapy, Fraess says.
Fraess left Maryland at the end of the summer to return to the U of S to complete his final year of veterinary college. When he last saw Stephen, the turtle was doing well, he said.
“He’s so resilient that he’s already trucking around in his wheelchair. If you didn’t see the wheelchair, he would have looked like a normal turtle, so that was really, really cool to see.”