While Baltimore shivers in February's chill, one local couple thoroughly enjoys arctic-like weather -- the city zoo's most majestic maritime predators.
A love of ice, snow and frigid water is in the genes of these gleeful and toothy Great Whites: the adolescent polar bears Magnet and his girlfriend Anana.
On a sunny but freezing day last week, they played their own Super Bowl in the 40-degree waters of their 155,000-gallon pool at the Baltimore Zoo in Druid Hill Park, using a foot-long rawhide toy as the pigskin.
Anana stood at the edge, tossed the toy in the air with her mouth and, with one swipe of an oar-like paw, batted it halfway across the pool.
Enter Magnet, in cold pursuit. The big bear flopped into the huge tub, retrieved the toy, flipped over and began floating in the numbing water, the rawhide strip clenched between his iron jaws.
He never saw the white torpedo streaking toward him. Wham!
Anana struck from below, turning the pool into a frothy sea of fur and teeth until the pair disappeared underwater. Thirty seconds later, the bears emerged locked in uneasy embrace, each grasping the other's ear in its mouth.
Around and around the pool they spun, hearty growls piercing the crisp air. Abruptly, as if on cue, both released their grip and swam toward their respective corners, ignoring the prize floating nearby.
Their keepers enjoy the bears' antics but maintain a respectful distance. "These guys aren't just playful fuzzballs, and you can't treat them as such," says Karen Fulton, the zoo's associate mammal curator.
"People always ask how soft is their fur, and how often do we play with the bears. The thought of actually doing that would never occur to any of us. Remember, their cousins are up there in the arctic right now, chewing on seals."
Roommates for several years, the bears get along swimmingly. Both were born in captivity. Magnet, 6, was reared at the Toledo Zoo, while 5-year-old Anana, his mail-order companion, was a Chicago cub at the Lincoln Park Zoo.
Anana's name means "beautiful" in the language of the Inuit people of the Arctic Circle. Magnet was so named because he stuck close to his mother.
Now Magnet tips the scales at 1,000 pounds; his partner, 800 -- thanks to a diet of monkey chow, dog food, apples and rainbow trout.
Though most kinds of bears are omnivorous, wild polar bears are flesh eaters because their habitat, the snow-swept roof of the globe, offers little else. There, Ursus maritimus is as formidable a predator as anything on Earth, with jaws that many sharks would envy.
The male polar bear can attain a length of 9 1/2 feet and weight of 1,400 pounds; the female a little less. With its thick fur, webbed toes and forepaws the size of dinner plates, the polar bear is lord of the floes, king of the top the world, the Arctic Circle.
More than 20,000 bears still roam the snow-swept coastal areas of Alaska, Canada, Greenland, Norway and Russia, hopscotching across floating blocks of ice in search of seals, their favorite prey.
To survive, the species has developed remarkable hunting techniques. Polar bears can sniff a seal from 20 miles away. When hunting on open ice, bears may shield their black noses with snow to maintain their camouflage and have been known to wait patiently on the ice by a seal's breathing hole for 14 hours.
True tri-athletes of the animal world, the bears can swim 60 miles in icy seas without a rest and leap 6-foot-high hurdles on land.
Unusual eyelids serve as polar-ized sunglasses to shield the bears from the snow's glare.
And suction-like cavities on the soles of their feet help them give chase on slippery ice.
The Baltimore climate, even in February, is a breeze for a species that thrives in subzero weather.
After eight years of caring for the bears at the Baltimore Zoo, animal keeper Janet Boliek has a "healthy respect" for any creature that can raise a 500-pound seal from water with one paw.
She has never petted Magnet or Anana.
The only polar bears Ms. Boliek handles are the small stuffed toys she collects at home.
Ms. Boliek, a graduate of Baltimore's Western High School, understands the power of polar bears. "They look cuddly, but if one gets hold of you it could kill you," she says.
The Baltimore Zoo has had one fatality: In 1976, a 43-year-old mental patient broke into the zoo after hours, climbed into the polar bear enclosure and was bitten to death.
Security has improved since then. And, though Magnet and Anana never have menaced their keeper, Ms. Boliek takes precautions: She always keep the animals in sight and double-checks the locks on all doors between human and beast.
Zoo officials worry that many spectators lack respect for the bears. Last year, people even began placing children atop a glass partition beside the pool, to give them a better view. Ms. Fulton, the associate curator, points out that polar bears are capable of jumping 8 feet in the air from a swimming start.
Visitors can be just as careless with their belongings. Trash and other items (toys, gloves, batteries) have been fished from the polar pool by the keepers or the animals themselves, who may eat the debris. (During a routine zoo autopsy, veterinarians discovered a rubber pacifier in the stomach of Millie, a bear who died of old age here six years ago.)
A new metal fence surrounding the bear exhibit is expected to correct both problems. Yet employees wonder: Will the new fence protect the people from the bears, or the bears from the people?
It is ironic that the zoo's Great Whites are most playful during a season when relatively few people brave the cold to visit them.
Jill Lion, 53, a sculptor who lives in Northwest Baltimore, bundled up to glimpse the icy frolic last week. Magnet greeted her by doing a thundering bellyflop into the pool. Ms. Lion shuddered, then smiled.
TH "It makes you wonder if, maybe, all's right in the world," she said.