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One of the first-ever images of the Mount Lyell shrew in California High up in the Sierra Nevada, the tiny Mount Lyell shrew has been shying away from cameras since it was first identified almost 100 years ago. Despite being a documented species, it was the only known mammal in California that had never been photographed.<\/p>\n That is, until three young researchers ventured into the mountains with a plan.<\/p>\n To catch the shifty shrew on film for the first time, Vishal Subramanyan<\/a>, Prakrit Jain<\/a> and Harper Forbes<\/a> planned a three-day expedition. Subramanyan, who graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, last year, is a wildlife photographer. Jain and Forbes, undergraduate students at UC Berkeley and the University of Arizona, respectively, made headlines in 2022 for discovering two new scorpion species<\/a>. After receiving permits<\/a> from California\u2019s Department of Fish and Wildlife, the trio headed to the Eastern Sierra. They set up 150 pitfall traps near stream and wetland habitats and checked in on them every two hours.<\/p>\n The Mount Lyell shrew<\/p>\n Vishal Subramanyan \u00a9 California Academy of Sciences<\/span><\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n The team planned to stake out to catch the rodents, never sleeping for too long, because the animals have such fast metabolisms that they die quickly without food\u2014and the students didn\u2019t want to leave the shrews stranded in the traps. They got set up, then they waited.<\/p>\n \u201cI would love to say we spent three days waiting, and the shrew finally appeared at the last second,\u201d says Subramanyan to Astrid Kane at the San Francisco Standard<\/em><\/a>. \u201cBut we got the Mount Lyell within the first two hours.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIt just shows that it\u2019s generally an underappreciated species in an underappreciated ecosystem, that people haven\u2019t spent the time and been able to actually bring dedicated focus to the shrews,\u201d he adds to Issy Ronald at CNN<\/a>.<\/p>\n
To photograph the shrews, the team had to work quickly. They continued to trap more of the rodents, following their planned sleep schedule during the nights, when temperatures dropped to 15 degrees Fahrenheit. The researchers set up a white background and a terrarium for the imaging. \u201cYou trap some shrews, you photograph them, you release them, and by that time there are more shrews. So it was pretty nonstop,\u201d Subramanyan says to SFGATE<\/em><\/a>\u2019s Timothy Karoff.<\/p>\n The animals run around a lot\u2014and bite\u2014making it especially hard to get good photos of them. \u201cFor every photo that we got in focus, we must have 10 or 20 photos where the shrew is running out of the frame,\u201d says Jain to Sabrina Imbler at Defector<\/em><\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n They took tissue samples from the animals for genetic testing at the California Academy of Sciences to confirm they\u2019d caught the right shrew. The team also trapped three other species of shrew: the vagrant shrew, montane shrew and Merriam\u2019s shrew.<\/p>\n The Mount Lyell shrew<\/p>\n Vishal Subramanyan \u00a9 California Academy of Sciences<\/span><\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n The students hope their work will increase public recognition for shrews and other less charismatic animals. \u201cMany, many species of shrew are known from only a single specimen, or only known from a single locality, or have not been seen in decades,\u201d says Jain to Katharine Gammon at the Guardian<\/em><\/a>. \u201cSo if we struggle to find a shrew in a place like California\u2014one of the best studied places in the world\u2014you can only imagine how the shrew diversity of places like southeast Asia and central Africa, for instance, can just be so under-appreciated.\u201d<\/p>\n Mount Lyell shrews are also extremely threatened by climate change\u201489 percent of the rodent\u2019s habitat is projected to be lost by the 2080s, according to a statement<\/a> from the University of California, Berkeley.\u00a0While the state does not consider the shrew to be endangered, it\u2019s listed as a mammal species of special concern. Observing and documenting the animals alive for the first time will help scientists better understand them.<\/p>\n \u201cIf we look at the extinction crisis and the types of animals it\u2019s impacting, a lot of animals are disappearing without any documentation,\u201d Subramanyan says to the Guardian<\/em>. \u201cAn animal like the Mount Lyell shrew, if it was not photographed or researched, could have just quietly disappeared due to climate change, and we\u2019d have no idea about it at all.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n Vishal Subramanyan \u00a9 California Academy of Sciences<\/span>
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