BERLIN - The German city of Nuremberg has launched a webpage dedicated to the country's latest celebrity polar bear.
Visitors have already inundated the site's operators with name suggestions for the four-week-old cub. The site -- www.eisbaer.nuernberg.de - launched today - provides details on the cub's health and lures viewers with a photo gallery.
City spokesman Robert Hackner says they're getting 15 e-mails with name suggestions every minute.
For now, the zoo's keepers have dubbed the cub, thought to be female, Flocke -- German for flake, as in snow flake -- because of its brilliantly white and fluffy fur.
Flocke was taken from its mother, Vera, on Tuesday amid concerns she could harm or even kill the newborn, and will not be returned to her.
The decision was made after keepers saw Vera carrying the cub around in her jaws and tossing it around her enclosure.
The cub is the first in Germany to be hand-raised by its keepers since Knut, who became a celebrity after being rescued in late 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.
Flocke's popularity is beginning to emulate that of Knut, and the Nuremberg Zoo now provides daily news conferences to update the public on the cub's condition.
On Friday, zoo veterinarian Bernhard Neurohr said Flocke's eyes were still closed and the cub was sleeping beneath an infrared lamp to keep warm.
The bottle-fed cub now weighs 2 kilograms and is about 35 centimetres long. If it cries, a nearby baby monitor alerts its four keepers.
Hackner said the city has yet to decide on what to name the cub - or when - but that has not prevented German newspapers from offering their own ideas.
Mass-circulation daily Bild has suggested "Knutschi" and already is trying its hand at polar bear matchmaking.
On Thursday, it asked: "Will she become Mrs. Knut?"
