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Photo: Vishal Subramanyan/California Academy of Sciences.
“High up in the Sierra Nevada,” writes the Smithsonian, “the tiny Mount Lyell shrew has been shying away from cameras since it was first identified almost 100 years ago. Then three undergraduates hit the jackpot.

I’m not sure if I regard today’s update as more about a threatened mammal or about achieving something important when you’re still an undergraduate.

Here are two takes on the story of a rarely studied shrew that is threatened by climate change. First, an interview at National Public Radio (NPR).

“Juana Summers, Host
“For more than 100 years, scientists have known about a shrew living in the mountains around Yosemite National Park. California designated it a ‘species of special concern,’ but nobody had seen it.

“Vishal Subramanyan
“There’s never actually been even a confirmed sighting of the shrew alive, just because they’re almost always found dead.

“Sacha Pfeiffer, Host
“Vishal Subramanyan is a wildlife photographer and a recent graduate of the University of California, Berkeley. Back in the fall, he and two other undergraduate student researchers, Harper Forbes and Prakrit Jain, decided to find a Mount Lyell shrew. … So they set off into the Sierra Nevada mountains with a lot of plastic cups to set traps in the ground to try to catch this elusive creature.

“Prakrit Jain
“Shrews are quite fast and not very personable, at least at first. They’re always running away. If you try to pick them up, sometimes they might try to bite.

“Summers
“Prakrit Jain is still a student at Berkeley, and he says, before you can even think about the taming of the shrew, you’ve first got to catch one alive. …

“Pfeiffer
“Once you catch one, you have to act quickly because this shrew has a very fast metabolism. That means if they don’t eat every few hours, they can die in the traps.

“Subramanyan
“It was pretty much just go, go, go, and we never really slept for more than two hours at a time. And throughout the course of the three nights and four days, we probably never slept for more than eight hours ’cause we were just constantly trapping, photographing, then trapping again.

“Summers
“Their traps caught a lot of shrews — several different species, actually — but the researchers suspected that at least five of them were the ones they were actually looking for.

“Pfeiffer
“This month, genetic testing confirmed that these undergraduate students had indeed taken the first known photographs of the Mount Lyell shrew.

“Summers
“It may seem like a lot of work to snap a photo, but Subramanyan says it’s actually really important for the world to see these furry little animals. He points to studies that show how other small mammals in the region are at risk with their habitat rapidly warming. And this shrew and its long snout help put a face to the impacts of climate change on biodiversity.

“Subramanyan
“A majority of species that are disappearing aren’t these, you know, traditionally charismatic species you hear about like lions and wolves. But it’s often these smaller, often overlooked animals that are disappearing completely under the radar with no public awareness or attention.

“Pfeiffer
“These researchers say that they dream of exploring far off and distant places. But they realize that the breakthrough they made in what was already a well-studied part of the world shows there’s still a lot to learn closer to home.”

At the Smithsonian there’s a roundup of other interviews.

“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. After receiving permits from California’s 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. …

“They got set up, then they waited.

“ ‘I would love to say we spent three days waiting, and the shrew finally appeared at the last second,’ says Subramanyan to Astrid Kane at the San Francisco Standard. ‘But we got the Mount Lyell within the first two hours.’

“ ‘It just shows that it’s generally an underappreciated species in an underappreciated ecosystem, that people haven’t spent the time and been able to actually bring dedicated focus to the shrews,’ he adds to Issy Ronald at CNN.

“To photograph the shrews, the team had to work quickly. They continued to trap more of the animals, 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. ‘You trap some shrews, you photograph them, you release them, and by that time there are more shrews. So it was pretty nonstop,’ Subramanyan says to SFGATE’s Timothy Karoff.

“The animals run around a lot — and bite — making it especially hard to get good photos of them. ‘For every photo that we got in focus, we must have 10 or 20 photos where the shrew is running out of the frame,’ says Jain to Sabrina Imbler at Defector. …

‘The students hope their work will increase public recognition for shrews and other less charismatic animals. ‘Many, 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,’ says Jain to Katharine Gammon at the Guardian. ‘So if we struggle to find a shrew in a place like California — one of the best studied places in the world — you can only imagine how the shrew diversity of places like southeast Asia and central Africa, for instance, can just be so under-appreciated.’

“Mount Lyell shrews are also extremely threatened by climate change — 89 percent of the animal’s habitat is projected to be lost by the 2080s, according to a statement from the University of California, Berkeley. …

“ ‘If we look at the extinction crisis and the types of animals it’s impacting, a lot of animals are disappearing without any documentation,’ Subramanyan says to the Guardian. ‘An animal like the Mount Lyell shrew, if it was not photographed or researched, could have just quietly disappeared due to climate change, and we’d have no idea about it at all.’ ”

More at NPR, here., and at the Smithsonian, here.

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