Taipei  - A Taiwan newspaper on Saturday refused to apologize for an April Fool's Day prank that claimed two pandas from China were disguised forest bears.

The joke angered the Taipei Zoo, where officials demanded that the English-language Taipei Times run a correction.

"Printing funny, fake stories has a long tradition in Western media. Not only is it funny, it reminds people to read the news with a critical eye," the Times said.

The newspaper reported Wednesday that a zoo official recently discovered the two pandas were in fact Wenzhou brown forest bears that had been dyed to create the panda's distinctive black and white markings.

The story said the official became suspicious when the pandas began to spend almost all of their waking hours having sex, as pandas are known for their low libidos.

Zoo spokesman Jason King said the zoo was flooded with phone calls from as far afield as Britain, Japan and Canada, whose callers asked if the pandas were forest bears in disguise.

The pair of pandas, an endangered species found only in central- and south-western China, were sent to Taiwan late last year as a goodwill gesture from China as a result of warming cross-strait relations.

April Fool's Day pranks have become a tradition of sorts for the Times. In 2006, the newspaper reported that Taiwan's Defence Ministry had discovered a secret weapons programme that used chemicals extracted from chewed betel nuts. Their 2005 story was about then vice president Annette Lu sobbing after attending a concert by a singing camel. (dpa)