Animal Fix: Polar Bear Cubs, Lemurs Trying to Keep Warm & a Baby White Bison

The New Knut 

Zoo deputy director in Nuremberg, Dr Helmut Maegdefrau, updated reporters on the bear cub situation on Thursday morning.

He said the zoo was still looking for another orphan bear, "so that it can smell and hear the ice bear, as it does not have a mother bear."

"We will try to get a playing companion as soon as possible, but it is really difficult at this stage and age. In three months it will me a bit easier, because the bears of this age stay normally in caves with their mothers," he added.

The deputy director also asked for more restraint around the bear enclosure.

"We will definitely make sure to seal the area off for media vehicles to give them a bit of peace. We've seen yesterday that both lady bears do react to the whole thing more than we thought," he told reporters at the zoo gate.

Concerning the yet-unnamed 4-week-old cub, Maegdefrau said the situation is different than in Berlin zoo with its famous polar bear Knut.

"Everybody should take part in the naming. We are a public institution, we belong to the city of Nuremberg and in this context the situation is different than in Berlin," he said.

Zoo officials announced on Wednesday that Germany's new polar bear cub is probably a female.

The cub's eyes are not yet open and its sexual organs not completely developed, so there's still a chance 'she' could be a 'he', the Nuremberg zoo's deputy director Helmut Maegdefrau told reporters.

But the cub, taken from its mother, Vera, on Tuesday amid concerns she could harm or even kill the newborn, is lively, strong and well-fed, Maegdefrau said.

Four keepers are caring for the baby bear, who weighed in at 1.75 kilograms (3.75 pounds), feeding it high-fat milk every four hours.

The cub, which does little more at the moment than sleep, is the first in Germany to be handraised by its keepers since Knut, who became a celebrity after being rescued in 2006 when his mother rejected him.

He was raised by hand, much to the delight of thousands of visitors to Berlin's zoo who avidly followed his growth from a roly-poly cub to a full-grown adult.

Another polar bear at Nuremberg, Vilma, gave birth around the same time as Vera but is believed to have killed and eaten her cubs earlier this week because they were sick.

The new cub will not be returned to its mother out of fear that Vera might eat it. The controversial decision to hand raise the cub was made after Vera was seen carrying the cub around the enclosure in her jaws.

Maegdefrau said that the mother was completely confused.

The Berlin zoo celebrated Knut's first birthday on December 5 and a year that saw zoo attendance up by 20 percent following Knut's debut in March 2007.

Unlike Berlin, the Nuremberg zoo is seeking another motherless polar or brown bear cub to raise alongside Vera's newborn.

Vera's cub is expected to make its public debut by early April.

Unlike Knut, who was named by the Berlin zoo, Nuremberg's deputy mayor wants to hold a public competition to name the new cub.

Knut could be a hard act to follow. The boisterous polar bear, who now weighs more than 265 pounds, has his own blog and TV show, and has appeared in scores of articles worldwide, including the cover of the German Vanity Fair.

Too big to play with his keeper, Thomas Doerflein, he now has an enclosure all to himself.

Rare Baby Lemur 

A rare species of lemur was being hand reared by a team at Bristol Zoo in the UK on Thursday.

Two-month-old Raz, an aye aye, a type of lemur that looks like a cross between a mouse and bat, is only the second of its species to be born in Britain.

The lemur, born on 23 November 2007, still fits in the palm of a hand but will grow to be the world's biggest nocturnal primate.

It has been hunted to near-extinction as a bad omen in its native Madagascar,.

Four keepers are hand-rearing Raz, giving him two-hourly feeds round the clock.

His name is short for Razafindranriatsimaniry, which in Malagasy means "son of a Prince" or "Noble man who envies nobody".

Once thought to be extinct in its native home of Madagascar, the aye aye is classified as an endangered species and there could be as few as 1,000 of them left, experts say.

The species of lemur is also threatened from deforestation in Madagascar.

Some people also view them as pests due to their penchant for plantation crops.

Lemurs Cozy Up to the Heater 

Chilly ring-tailed lemurs at the Japan Monkey Centre in Aichi Prefecture have been quick to seize upon an opportunity to keep warm this winter, jostling for positions in front of an electric heater put in their enclosure for staff.

"The heater was brought into the cage originally for the employees because it was so cold to work here," one employee told Japanese television on Wednesday.

But the primates now line up in front of the device, often in their favourite position sitting upright with their hands outstretched.

Employees said they were surprised by the lemurs' interest in the heater as they are normally afraid of electrical appliances.

Indigenous to Madagascar in the Indian ocean, lemurs are the most primitive primates and are among the world's most endangered species.

They have difficulty regulating their body temperature and usually heat their bodies by lying in direct sunlight.

Employees said the creatures sometimes fight over the best positions in front of the heater, most commonly in the evening when the sun is down, and on cloudy days.

Dakota Miracle: The baby White Bison

It took more than four months, but a rare white bull calf finally has a name.

Dakota Miracle is what this baby bison will be called. He got his name from a Jamestown, North Dakota couple after the National Buffalo Museum held a contest. The winning couple said they chose the name because of the remote possibility of an albino bull calf being born in the state.

Museum officials say more tests will need to be done on the calf to make sure it's a true albino, but they say his pink eyes are a good indication.

Dakota Miracle was born August 31 to his mother, White Cloud.