In the painfully aww-inducing video above, a five-week-old polar bear cub at the Columbus Zoo is dreaming away. The little one is so young she hasn’t yet fully opened her eyes, though she started to the day before this video was made. What images could she possibly be seeing in her dreams?
The cub is also so young—she was born Nov. 5—she doesn’t even have a name. Her mom’s name is Aurora. Almost immediately after the cub was born, Aurora started taking longer and longer breaks from mommy duty, so zookeepers decided to remove the cub from her birth den and into a facility where they could hand rear around the clock her to help ensure her survival.
Polar bears have one of the lowest reproductive rates of any mammal, and the cub survival rate is also low. As with panda cubs, they’re very small and very delicate. Cubs raised by humans or in the wild have about the same survival rate: 50 percent.
And what about the sounds the cub is making? According to the zoo, that symphony of noises she’s making are the sounds of contentment. In making the video, you hear a lot of background noises because they made sure to crank up the microphone to catch the cub’s tiniest squees.
