How to fix a wombat’s teeth

School-bus-yellow signs along Australia’s roads sport a silhouette of a kangaroo, koala, or wombat—a reminder for motorists to drive safely. The signs aren’t only for the benefit of drivers: They also list an “Injured wildlife” telephone number to call.

In the state of Victoria, many wounded animals end up at one of Zoos Victoria’s three locations. One of those, Healesville Sanctuary, has a veterinary hospital that helps 1,500 injured wildlife a year.

In 2014, Girius Antanaitis sent Zoos Victoria staffers an email asking if they needed help with wildlife medical instruments. At the time, he was making surgical instruments for what he calls “large terrestrial creatures”—humans—after studying industrial design at Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. But he had always been interested in animals and the bush.

The zoo staff answered him within a week and asked for a needle long enough to deliver euthanasia drugs to the hearts of beached whales that couldn’t be saved. “To alleviate suffering, it’s most humane to euthanize them. Other methods can be quite brutal,” says Antanaitis. But the intra­cardiac needles on the market weren’t designed for whales. So he made one.

He’s been busy designing, developing, and manufacturing surgical implementation, implants, and apparatus for wildlife healthcare ever since.

Antanaitis lists at least a dozen in-process projects, from specialized surgical instruments to screws for broken wings to external fixators for broken turtle shells. Tools ordered by size neatly line his workshop walls. Labeled chests of drawers support drills, micro-lathes, and the microscope he uses to check the precision of his inventions.

“A lot of instrumentation is either for human surgery or for domestic animals,” said Antanaitis from his garage workshop in the suburbs of Melbourne. “It’s either too small or too large, or it’s not suited for Australian animals specifically.”

The mouths of wombats, kangaroos, wallabies, and koalas have a very small “gape” or opening compared with non-Australian animals. Wombats, like beavers, have two incisors in front of their always-growing molars.

“In the wild,” explains Antanaitis, “wombats tend to have food which wears away the spurs on the molars, which means they don’t impinge on the cheeks.” But an animal’s injuries might prevent it from being released into the wild and to natural tooth-wearing foods.

Antanaitis watched the vets struggle to access and grind down a wombat’s overgrown molar spurs. Within a year, he had designed and manufactured a dental gag now being used for wombats and other Australian mammals.

Not every project takes as long to develop. In 2019, Antanaitis received a call from the Orangutan Foundation. A poached sun bear in Borneo named Hitam had been mistreated and fed only rice and milk in captivity. Her malformed pelvic bones meant every bowel movement caused extreme pain. She would have to be euthanized if she didn’t have surgery. Antanaitis had never designed an implant before, but he and Dr. Gordon Corfield, the head surgeon, drew up plans. Within weeks, Antanaitis had a prototype ready.

“I sent it to Dr. Corfield so he could test it on a skeleton of a large dog, which has the closest physiology to the sun bear he could find.” Antanaitis found a company to manufacture the final product, which needed locking screws, a part he couldn’t make in his home workshop. Hitam’s surgery was a success.

Although the Victoria government provides some grant money to registered wildlife rehabilitators (up to 230,000 Australian dollars total in 2022), wildlife hospitals rely largely on individual donations to stay afloat. The small-scale surgical needs of Australian wildlife hospitals don’t garner attention from large manufacturing companies. Antanaitis spent two years trying to find a company that could cost-effectively manufacture pins for avian orthopedics.

“These wildlife hospitals just don’t have the budgets to spend hundreds of dollars per set. And that’s how much it would have cost.” So Antanaitis did it himself. He often donates what he manufactures, and has to take side jobs to fund his wildlife work.

He’s currently working on a set of 300 pins for setting the broken wings of small birds. Ranging in thickness from 0.5 to 1.6 millimeters, each pin requires at least 12 steps to complete, not including microscopically quality-checking each pin. “If you’re off by a micron, a couple of microns, or even 0.01 of a millimeter, then you can ruin that whole batch.”

He recently sent a prototype of avian orthopedic wire benders to Bonorong Wildlife Rescue in Tasmania. Within weeks, vets used them and others of his tools to treat the broken wings of hundreds of seagulls nesting on a road at high tide at night and hit by a car.

Antanaitis said, “When I design and make things, I try to make things as practical as possible. And fit for a purpose.”