Attempts to bread a baby polar bear in Japan were thrown into chaos after it was discovered that the “male polar bear” brought to mate with a female polar bear was not all the he, or as the case was she, seemed.

Tsuyoshi, a four-year-old, 441 lb (200kg) cream-colored polar bear had been living in harmony with a female polar bear since June with the two often “playing together,” but babies just weren’t happening.

Reuters reports a zookeeper saying:

We thought he was a male, so we never had any doubts as we took care of him.

But one day we realized that the two bears urinate in the same way, and we thought, is that how males do it? And once we started to look at things that way, we weren’t quite so sure.

Two DNA examinations of Tsuyoshi’s hair and a manual exam later, the Kushiro Municipal Zoo found Tsuyoshi to be a female.

“We do have mixed feelings,” said the Zoo Keeper.

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