The young polar bear Hertha from the Berlin zoo is the result of unwitting inbreeding.
The parents of the audience favorite are siblings, as Zoo and Tierpark Director Andreas Knieriem announced on Tuesday.
The polar bear mother Tonja was assigned false papers at Moscow Zoo after she was born in 2009.
The polar bear, who has lived in the facility in the eastern part of Berlin since 2011, should not have any further offspring.
Mother and daughter Hertha will remain in Berlin until further notice, as Knieriem emphasized.
“Both get along well, they respect and accept each other.” Volodja, the father of around two-year-old Hertha, comes from the same parents as Tonja.
He came to the Netherlands from Berlin in 2019.
A biologist from the Moscow Zoo had noticed contradicting information about Tonja's date of birth while looking through older documents.
In another polar bear family in Moscow, another female cub was born almost at the same time as Tonja's birth.
A genetic analysis has now brought clarity.
The result was a shock for many in the zoo, said director Knieriem.
"For the responsible work of the European Conservation Breeding Program, this serious mistake is a very regrettable setback." There is no new breeding license for the time being.
Achim Gruber, director of the Institute for Animal Pathology at the Free University, answered the question of what inbreeding meant for Hertha: "Nothing".
In the case of inbreeding in a polar bear generation, no negative consequences for offspring are to be expected.
Knieriem stressed that he did not want to address blame on the Moscow institution.
It was a human mistake.
In addition, there was transparency in this case.
Polar bears are a symbol of the endangered nature, also due to climate change. An estimated 20,000 to 25,000 of the threatened animals are still living in the wild.