Welcome to our sun bear enclosure! We've been joined today by Kirsty, who's very kindly put a wee scatter feed out for the bears while we're here. 

Tell us about the sun bears we have here?

We've got a male and a female. So Babu is further back there and Rotana is closer at the front. The best way of telling them apart is that Rotana has got a much more wrinkly face, whereas Babu's much more smooth her facial expression, and he's also got a much more orangey crest and that's actually how they get their name "sun bears" because it looks like a rising or setting sun.

When we think of animals at zoo most of the animals that we have tend to come from the captive breeding populations in other zoo collections. Inn the case of Rotana (and Somnang who left us) they came from a bit of a different background so tell us briefly a wee bit about how we ended up with Rotana?

Tell us about Rotana's background?

Unfortunately they had a little bit of a sad start in life. One of the threats to the sun bear is actually the illegal pet trade and this is how Somnang and Rotana actually had their start - so they were captured illegally from the wild as cubs and kept in a very very small cage. Unfortunately it did cause quite a lot of trauma to them as you can imagine, but they were then found and rescued by a foundation called "Free the Bears" and they brought them back to health and then they got in contact with Edinburgh Zoo in 2010 and asked if we would be happy to take on some rescue bears, and of course we jumped at the chance! We then housed them right the way up until 2018 (when Somnang left). 

As i said earlier on, when they first came here they did have some issues from their traumatic background, but they soon found their feet and were able to be bears once again, which is lovely to see! Somnang has gone on to be a dad at another zoo, and hopefully Rotana will go on to be a dad as well! With the fact that they are wild-caught, their genetics are incredibly important for the captive breeding programme and for this soon-to-be very endangered species! 

Sun bears are probably the lesser known of the bear family, so tell us a bit about the key features that makes sun bears so particularly special?

What makes sun bears special?

Sun bears are actually the smallest species of bear, but what they lack in size they make up for an attitude! They can be incredibly aggressive and they have very long claws (which you might be able to see right now in Babu because she's tucking into some sweet potato!) That's actually well adapted for breaking into beehives and because honey is one of the many favourites of sun bears and they would use those claws to break open beehives in the wild. 

They also have very loose skin as well, you can see it much more on Rotana as he's scratching at the back there, and this is again to help with that beehive love because they won't actually be able to feel the bees or the wasps stinging them because that fur is so thick. This also helps because they can be found naturally in the same range as tigers, and so if a tiger was silly enough to take on a sun bear and jump on the back of one, the sun bear can actually turn around in its skin and attack the tiger back! The tiger will then learn that maybe it's not a good idea to attack a sun bear! 

They also have a very long tongue which is about 25 centimeters long! Again that's great for helping them get their love of honey out to the hives.

We've got them here as part of a conservation breeding program for the future because their population has been dropping. But we can all shop sensibly to help to save sun bears and a variety of other species, so tell us what we really need to think about and how we need to buy the right products to help to save such an amazing animal?

How can we help sun bears in the wild?

Unfortunately one of the major threats to these guys is the palm oil industry and this is a "slash and burn" agriculture and it's causing so much deforestation and it's causing their habitat to shrink. So it's really important that we actually keep an eye out for a products that use palm oil, and avoid the ones that are using the destructive palm oil.