Elusive Calif. Mammal Has Been Photographed Alive For The First Time

The team set up traps in vegetation areas like this one to capture Mount Lyell shrews.

Prakrit Jain

If you’re not a biologist, the Mount Lyell shrew looks similar to other shrews that occupy the Sierra Nevada. It’s a small, grayish brown mammal with a pointy nose. Aside from its size, it’s not particularly eye-catching, but it has a distinction that sets it apart from any other mammal in the state: If you type its name into Google Images, you’ll come up dry.

Search results include a sketch of the animal, a map of its habitat range and shots of other California shrews, plucked from their Wikipedia pages. But photographs of a living Mount Lyell shrew are missing. In the coming days, that’s set to change.

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Until a few months ago, it was the only known mammal in the state of California that had never been caught on camera. In the century since biologists first identified the creature, it’s received little scientific attention, in part because of the difficulty of capturing one. In November, three young researchers snapped the first ever photographs of the tiny animal.

Vishal Subramanyan, 22, one of the researchers who photographed the animal, said it might be the first time a human has seen a living Mount Lyell shrew.

The shrew hasn’t been trapped or recorded in two decades, Subramanyan told SFGATE: “So it’s very possibly one of the most poorly known mammal species in California.”

A Mount Lyell shrew photographed in the brush near Lee Vining in the Eastern Sierra.

Vishal Subramanyan, Prakrit Jain, Harper Forbes

The Mount Lyell shrew (Sorex lyelli) is 9 to 10 centimeters long and weighs between 2 and 3 grams, according to the researchers’ measurements. It occupies a small, elevated area of the Eastern Sierra Nevada and feeds on insects, although biologists know little else about its diet. It has small, beady eyes and a pointy snout, and it spends most of its time below ground.

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Biologist Clinton Hart Merriam first identified the shrew more than 100 years ago, but since then it’s received little attention from mammalogists. Three short paragraphs comprise the shrew’s Wikipedia page.

Subramanyan undertook the project with his friends Prakrit Jain, 20, and Harper Forbes, 22. As high schoolers, Jain and Forbes were the first to discover and name a new species of scorpion. Forbes is now a student at University of Arizona, while Jain and Subramanyan are students at UC Berkeley. Jain is also an intern at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, and Subramanyan is part of the academy’s first cohort of California Creators for Nature.

Subramanyan said that he and Jain came up with the idea for the project after trapping and photographing small rodents in the Sierra Nevada on a field trip for their mammalogy class. That project sparked a fascination with small mammals. Upon returning home, they researched and learned that the Mount Lyell shrew was the only California mammal species that hadn’t been photographed alive.

“The majority of earth’s biodiversity remains unknown,” Jain wrote in a statement shared with SFGATE. “Projections suggest that most species remain scientifically undescribed, and of the described species, the majority remain unphotographed. Only a tiny fraction have seen any sort of detailed field study.

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“This issue persists even in well-studied places like California,” his statement continues. “In an era of rapid biodiversity loss, it is important to record this information while it still exists while simultaneously fighting the extinction crisis.”

After receiving a permit from California’s Department of Fish and Wildlife, the group departed from the Berkeley campus on Nov. 1, kicking off a three-night field expedition. They set up camp in the high desert of the Eastern Sierra, near the unincorporated community of Lee Vining, and used augurs to dig holes in the ground near stream and wetland areas. In the holes they inserted pitfall traps — which are “literally just plastic cups,” Subramanyan said — filled with cat food and mealworms. They captured two shrews within the first two hours. (There are several other species of shrew that live in the area, but Subramanyan said it was “safe to say” that a Lyell shrew was among the first they trapped.)

Then came the hard part. There’s a reason why nobody had photographed a living Mount Lyell shrew. Shrews have incredibly fast metabolisms and will die if they don’t eat every two hours, Subramanyan said. To catch a living shrew, researchers need to monitor their traps constantly. If mammalogists set an overnight trap, they’ll wake in the morning to find a dead shrew. Jain, Forbes and Subramanyan slept for no longer than two hours at a time, checking the traps regularly. At night, temperatures reached 15 degrees.

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“It was kind of go, go, go,” he said. “You trap some shrews, you photograph them, you release them, and by that time there are more shrews. So it was pretty nonstop.”

Subramanyan said that the cold and grueling sleep schedule made the expedition the most challenging he’s ever attempted. “It was really brutal,” he said. When he returned home, he slept for 20 hours.

Over the course of the expedition, the group captured 15 shrews of four different species: the vagrant shrew, montane shrew, Merriam’s shrew and the Mount Lyell shrew.

Although the Mount Lyell shrew is genetically distinct from the other shrews that share its range, it looks similar, although a bit smaller and lighter in color. To confirm that they had, in fact, found their species of interest, they used a scalpel to collect the tips of the shrew’s tails and ran genetics tests at the California Academy of Sciences.

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Jain, Forbes and Subramanyan also took measurements of the shrews’ lengths and ear sizes — observations that had previously only been performed with dead specimens.

By photographing the shrew, the researchers hope to build public recognition for the little-known species and support future conservation efforts. California doesn’t classify the Mount Lyell shrew as a threatened or endangered species, but the state lists it as a mammal species of special concern, a designation that offers it protections. A 2015 UC Davis study rated the shrew as either “highly vulnerable” or “extremely vulnerable” to climate change, depending on emission scenarios. That study projected that the shrew could lose between 52.6% and 89.5% of its habitat by the 2080s.

“Photography is really important for cataloging biodiversity on a rapidly changing planet,” Subramanyan said. “When it comes to California’s shrews, there’s so few good photos out there. So taking these photos that haven’t really been taken before helps the public understand and foster a connection with these animals.”

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Editor’s note: This story was corrected at 12:15 p.m., Jan. 17, to clarify that the shrews weigh 2 to 3 grams, according to the researchers’ measurements.

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