Xjyuk

Let's suppose I am writing a fictional but realistic story about a male zebra.

Here is the problem. On the one hand, the grammatical gender of the Russian word "зебра" is feminine, so it is ungrammatical to write "зебра поскакал" and "полосатый зебра," as the grammatical genders must agree. On the other hand, it is extremely awkward to use feminine grammatical forms like "поскакалa," "попилa," "полосатая," "быстрая," to write about a male zebra when its physiological sex forms an important part of the context. Look how awkward it is: "Зебра стала лидершей табуна и могла выбирать себе партнерш для спаривания." A noun of masculine grammatical gender is needed.

I am aware that there is possibly no obvious or widely accepted Russian word for a male zebra and that whilst it is common to make feminine nouns from masculine ones (лось → лосиха, кабан → кабаниха, крокодил → крокодилица, медведь → медведица, etc.), it apparently does not work in the opposite direction, for apparently there are no suffixes that convert a female animal to a male one.

A variant is "самец зебры," but it would be awkward to use that expression repetitively throughout the story.

Another idea is "зебрик," but this word has a diminutive connotation, which I want to avoid. I want to write about a big and powerful male zebra.

How would the native speakers resolve this issue?

In practical terms you once use the locution самец зебры and then drop зебры continuing with самец only, because from that point on it's already clear a male of what animal is being discussed.

In Google the expression самец зебры is common.

But it would be interesting to see how zoologists deal with this deficiency in their literature.

Usually developed lexicon for some species comes to an existence due to importance of such species in an everyday life of some specific region. That's why we have "кобель", "сука", "щенок"; "котёнок", "кот" and "кошка", "бык", "корова" and "телёнок".

And that's why we don't have a separate word for, say, newly born llamas. The same about zebras - the only real answer is that both in masculine and in feminine in Russian the only word once can use is "зебра". If for some reason this distinction should be done, the answers already provided covered it - "самец" and "самка" are the words to go for.

The other option would be to become a billionaire - or just a very influential person, to coin new term and invest heavily into it's adoption - than it can be "зебрик". Now it's only "зебра" :)

That's the matter of personal choice. But as we speaking of animals, I'd like to mention that in the classical Russian translation of "The Jungle Book" Bagheera simply becomes "she" to match his name and species (пантера) better.

But normally, you don't say just "зебра" when speaking of some particular animal anyway. You could say "самец", or, in a fiction story, an animal character could (should) have a personal name, etc.

"Зебрик" is only good for a child zebra.