A dog born with two legs has learned how to walk and is bringing hope to disabled soldiers in America.
Published: 10:02PM GMT 18 Dec 2009
The 7-year-old labrador-chow mix was born without front legs.
The puppy and her siblings, also deformed, were rejected by their mother. But Reuben Stringfellow, then 17, came across the tiny animal and brought it home.
He and his mother Jude, an English professor, had to carry the puppy, which they named Faith, for the first few months of her life. But eventually, with patience, and lots of peanut butter as a lure, Faith learned to walk on her two hind legs.
Seven years after her birth, the little yellow dog zips around crowded shops, bustling along with confidence.
Since her first steps in March, 2003, Faith has been a regular guest on US talk shows. She has also become a symbol of hope for injured soldiers.
Ms Stringfellow, who has become a motivational speaker and runs a website devoted to her tiny dog, gets more than 200 letters and emails a day.
Fans of the little dog say she provides inspiration.
"Faith has shown me that different is beautiful, that it is not the body you are in but the soul that you have," Jill Salomon of Montreal, Canada, wrote on the website.
Ms Stringfellow regularly brings Faith to veterans' hospitals across the US to provide hope to disabled soldiers, a mission inspired by her son's service in the US army in Iraq.
Ms Stringfellow told AP that during a recent visit to McChord Air Force Base and Fort Lewis in Washington, the dog brought cheer to soldiers heading off to war, and to those recently returned.
She just walks around barking and laughing and excited to see them all," Jude Stringfellow said. "There is a lot of crying, pointing and surprise. From those who have lost friends or limbs, there can be silence. Some will shake my hand and thank me, some will pat her on the head. There is a lot of quiet, heartfelt, really deep emotion."
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/6841609/Two-legged-dog-Faith-learns-to-walk.html
Showing posts with label deformities. Show all posts
Showing posts with label deformities. Show all posts
Saturday, December 19, 2009
Thursday, September 24, 2009
Frog Deformities: Sign of Parasites on the Rise?
September 22, 2009—You might call it a teenage mutant ninja frog—minus the ninja.
In northern California, foothill yellow-legged tadpoles are developing into juvenile frogs with missing legs and eyes, like the animal seen above in 2008. These deformities are possibly caused by outbreaks of an alien parasite from Eurasia that usually attacks fish used in aquaculture and the aquarium trade, a new study says.
Anchor worms flourished in the South Fork Eel River in 2006 and 2008, when heat waves pushed maximum weekly average water temperatures to 75 degrees Fahrenheit (23.7 degrees Celsius), researchers found. (See map.)
Those years were also drier than normal, corralling tadpoles into smaller pools and making them sitting ducks for parasites.
Once the parasitic crustaceans enter the gills of a tadpole victim, they feed off the tadpole's tissues until male and female parasites mate. The male dies soon after. Meanwhile the fertilized female bores her way partially out of the tadpole.
The female worm's head and part of its body then morph into an anchor-like growth attached to the base of the tadpole's tail or to its legs. The parasite's egg sac is attached to this external growth, but part of the female parasite remains inside the tadpole's body and damages internal tissues.
(Related: "Pesticides, Parasite May Cause Frog Deformities.")
It's unclear whether this damage is responsible for the young Eel River frogs' striking defects, said study co-author Alessandro Catenazzi, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Berkeley. But the team has found that many deformed frogs are infected.
The researchers also noticed that the most common malformations occur in the hind limbs—and in some cases the legs are missing altogether. Missing eyes are rare, he said, with only two cases recorded so far.
Infected frogs also tend to be smaller, making them weaker and less likely to survive the winter, according to the study, led by UC Berkeley's Sarah Kupferberg and published online in August in the journal Copeia.
Throughout California, dam construction and river flow management for irrigation, among other factors, have limited the yellow-legged frog's habitat, leading to a "dramatic decrease" of about 54 percent of the frog's native habitat, Catenazzi said. The frog historically was found from northern Oregon south to the San Gabriel Mountains near Los Angeles, as well as higher elevations in the Sierra Nevada.
The anchor worm is yet another blow to the vulnerable amphibians, the authors say, and climate change is expected to spur more parasite-favoring heat waves in California in the future.
—Christine Dell'Amore
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/09/090922-mutant-frogs-missing-limbs.html
In northern California, foothill yellow-legged tadpoles are developing into juvenile frogs with missing legs and eyes, like the animal seen above in 2008. These deformities are possibly caused by outbreaks of an alien parasite from Eurasia that usually attacks fish used in aquaculture and the aquarium trade, a new study says.
Anchor worms flourished in the South Fork Eel River in 2006 and 2008, when heat waves pushed maximum weekly average water temperatures to 75 degrees Fahrenheit (23.7 degrees Celsius), researchers found. (See map.)
Those years were also drier than normal, corralling tadpoles into smaller pools and making them sitting ducks for parasites.
Once the parasitic crustaceans enter the gills of a tadpole victim, they feed off the tadpole's tissues until male and female parasites mate. The male dies soon after. Meanwhile the fertilized female bores her way partially out of the tadpole.
The female worm's head and part of its body then morph into an anchor-like growth attached to the base of the tadpole's tail or to its legs. The parasite's egg sac is attached to this external growth, but part of the female parasite remains inside the tadpole's body and damages internal tissues.
(Related: "Pesticides, Parasite May Cause Frog Deformities.")
It's unclear whether this damage is responsible for the young Eel River frogs' striking defects, said study co-author Alessandro Catenazzi, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Berkeley. But the team has found that many deformed frogs are infected.
The researchers also noticed that the most common malformations occur in the hind limbs—and in some cases the legs are missing altogether. Missing eyes are rare, he said, with only two cases recorded so far.
Infected frogs also tend to be smaller, making them weaker and less likely to survive the winter, according to the study, led by UC Berkeley's Sarah Kupferberg and published online in August in the journal Copeia.
Throughout California, dam construction and river flow management for irrigation, among other factors, have limited the yellow-legged frog's habitat, leading to a "dramatic decrease" of about 54 percent of the frog's native habitat, Catenazzi said. The frog historically was found from northern Oregon south to the San Gabriel Mountains near Los Angeles, as well as higher elevations in the Sierra Nevada.
The anchor worm is yet another blow to the vulnerable amphibians, the authors say, and climate change is expected to spur more parasite-favoring heat waves in California in the future.
—Christine Dell'Amore
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/09/090922-mutant-frogs-missing-limbs.html
Frog Deformities: Sign of Parasites on the Rise?
September 22, 2009—You might call it a teenage mutant ninja frog—minus the ninja.
In northern California, foothill yellow-legged tadpoles are developing into juvenile frogs with missing legs and eyes, like the animal seen above in 2008. These deformities are possibly caused by outbreaks of an alien parasite from Eurasia that usually attacks fish used in aquaculture and the aquarium trade, a new study says.
Anchor worms flourished in the South Fork Eel River in 2006 and 2008, when heat waves pushed maximum weekly average water temperatures to 75 degrees Fahrenheit (23.7 degrees Celsius), researchers found. (See map.)
Those years were also drier than normal, corralling tadpoles into smaller pools and making them sitting ducks for parasites.
Once the parasitic crustaceans enter the gills of a tadpole victim, they feed off the tadpole's tissues until male and female parasites mate. The male dies soon after. Meanwhile the fertilized female bores her way partially out of the tadpole.
The female worm's head and part of its body then morph into an anchor-like growth attached to the base of the tadpole's tail or to its legs. The parasite's egg sac is attached to this external growth, but part of the female parasite remains inside the tadpole's body and damages internal tissues.
(Related: "Pesticides, Parasite May Cause Frog Deformities.")
It's unclear whether this damage is responsible for the young Eel River frogs' striking defects, said study co-author Alessandro Catenazzi, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Berkeley. But the team has found that many deformed frogs are infected.
The researchers also noticed that the most common malformations occur in the hind limbs—and in some cases the legs are missing altogether. Missing eyes are rare, he said, with only two cases recorded so far.
Infected frogs also tend to be smaller, making them weaker and less likely to survive the winter, according to the study, led by UC Berkeley's Sarah Kupferberg and published online in August in the journal Copeia.
Throughout California, dam construction and river flow management for irrigation, among other factors, have limited the yellow-legged frog's habitat, leading to a "dramatic decrease" of about 54 percent of the frog's native habitat, Catenazzi said. The frog historically was found from northern Oregon south to the San Gabriel Mountains near Los Angeles, as well as higher elevations in the Sierra Nevada.
The anchor worm is yet another blow to the vulnerable amphibians, the authors say, and climate change is expected to spur more parasite-favoring heat waves in California in the future.
—Christine Dell'Amore
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/09/090922-mutant-frogs-missing-limbs.html
In northern California, foothill yellow-legged tadpoles are developing into juvenile frogs with missing legs and eyes, like the animal seen above in 2008. These deformities are possibly caused by outbreaks of an alien parasite from Eurasia that usually attacks fish used in aquaculture and the aquarium trade, a new study says.
Anchor worms flourished in the South Fork Eel River in 2006 and 2008, when heat waves pushed maximum weekly average water temperatures to 75 degrees Fahrenheit (23.7 degrees Celsius), researchers found. (See map.)
Those years were also drier than normal, corralling tadpoles into smaller pools and making them sitting ducks for parasites.
Once the parasitic crustaceans enter the gills of a tadpole victim, they feed off the tadpole's tissues until male and female parasites mate. The male dies soon after. Meanwhile the fertilized female bores her way partially out of the tadpole.
The female worm's head and part of its body then morph into an anchor-like growth attached to the base of the tadpole's tail or to its legs. The parasite's egg sac is attached to this external growth, but part of the female parasite remains inside the tadpole's body and damages internal tissues.
(Related: "Pesticides, Parasite May Cause Frog Deformities.")
It's unclear whether this damage is responsible for the young Eel River frogs' striking defects, said study co-author Alessandro Catenazzi, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Berkeley. But the team has found that many deformed frogs are infected.
The researchers also noticed that the most common malformations occur in the hind limbs—and in some cases the legs are missing altogether. Missing eyes are rare, he said, with only two cases recorded so far.
Infected frogs also tend to be smaller, making them weaker and less likely to survive the winter, according to the study, led by UC Berkeley's Sarah Kupferberg and published online in August in the journal Copeia.
Throughout California, dam construction and river flow management for irrigation, among other factors, have limited the yellow-legged frog's habitat, leading to a "dramatic decrease" of about 54 percent of the frog's native habitat, Catenazzi said. The frog historically was found from northern Oregon south to the San Gabriel Mountains near Los Angeles, as well as higher elevations in the Sierra Nevada.
The anchor worm is yet another blow to the vulnerable amphibians, the authors say, and climate change is expected to spur more parasite-favoring heat waves in California in the future.
—Christine Dell'Amore
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/09/090922-mutant-frogs-missing-limbs.html
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