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The attraction between humans, especially children, and bottlenose dolphins is immediate. The animals are responsive, trainable, and smart, and have been helpful to mankind since antiquity. Study of remarkable wound-healing properties in dolphins may improve treatment of serious skin wounds in humans.
Zasloff and colleagues studied two severely wounded adult animals, Nari and Echo, in an Australian marine lab. The animals had sustained shark-inflicted wounds, 30 cm long and 4 cm deep, that seemed relatively painless and healed in several quick stages. Within a day, blubber migrated to the surface and formed a white “wound dressing.” By day 2, “pink granulation tissue” gradually filled the wound upward fr…