The zoo’s new sloth bear Niko. (Photo by Roshan Patel/Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute)

What has a hankering for ants and termites, nostrils that can close completely, and just arrived at the National Zoo from Germany?

Meet Niko the 2-year-old sloth bear, who got shipped to D.C. earlier this month.

While Niko will make his public debut on the Asia Trail exhibit in early November, he’s currently in a 30-day quarantine, standard procedure for new zoo animals. Keepers are keeping him busy with tree trunks, branches, puzzle feeders, and bobbin toys in the interim, per the zoo.

More interestingly, Niko can already see, hear, and smell 3-year-old sloth bear Remi, who already lives at the zoo, and “they appear to be very curious about and interested in one another,” the zoo says. Formal introductions “with and without mesh barriers” will follow the quarantine. Intriguing!

So are the two fated as pairs in prolonging their species, deemed vulnerable to extinction by the International Union for Conservation of Nature?

Not yet, perv. They’ve still got a few years ’til it’s time to breed, though keepers hope they’ll be down with splitting their habitat and otherwise hanging out in the meantime.

Whether they’ll ultimately mate is a question for the Association of Zoos and Aquariums’ Species Survival Plan, which plays matchmaker for the National Zoo’s animals. But there’s no question both of the sloth bears will join the breeding program—they’re two of only 28 such bears in North America.

Sloth bears, which have no relation to sloths, hail from India, Sri Lanka, and Nepal, though fewer than 20,000 remain there, the zoo says.

One element of Niko’s introduction that should have the legions of sloth bear fans excited is that his debut coincides with the launch of a new high-definition sloth bear web camera, in the same vein as the popular panda cam.

Until then, though, visitors can still see Remi at the Asia Trail.