Lessons from a six-year-old, and more

Lessons from a six-year-old

Six-year-old Lucy Magnum emerged from a terrible shark attack with a message of grace. The little girl was boogie-boarding in shallow water off the North Carolina coast when a shark sank its teeth into her leg. Her parents quickly applied pressure to the wound until emergency workers arrived, saving her leg. Not surprisingly, Lucy said after the incident, “I hate sharks. I like dolphins way better.” But once her parents explained to her that the shark didn’t know that she was a human and had made a mistake, she changed her mind. “I don’t care that the shark bit me,” Lucy told her mother. “I forgive him.”

Pilot survives crash and 18-hour swim

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Things looked grim for amateur pilot Michael Trapp after the engine failed on his Cessna 150 during a flight from New York to Wisconsin, plunging him into Lake Huron 17 miles offshore. The plane sank immediately, with the emergency beacon and life jacket aboard, leaving Trapp with no choice but to tread water or swim. Several boats failed to see him as he swam for 18 hours toward a smokestack he saw in the distance, but finally some boaters spotted his feeble wave. “I started crying when they turned around,” said Trapp.

The Tulotoma snail gets an upgrade

The Tulotoma snail, a 2-inch-long creature native to the Coosa River in Alabama, has become the first mollusk in U.S. history to be removed from the endangered species list. In the early ’90s, the Tulotoma was extinct in 99 percent of its historic range, where dams had slowed the river’s flow. Enforcement of the Clean Water Act and the Alabama Power Company’s installation of aeration systems have restored the Tulotoma to 10 percent of its historic range, triggering an upgrade of its status to “threatened.”