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The taming of the shrew. And to do so, these mammalogists had to be shrewd.
Scientists rarely, if ever, succeed in trapping it alive
By Timothy Karoff, Culture Reporter Updated Jan 17, 2025 12:20 p.m. - SFGATE
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.
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.”
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.
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.
An elusive California mammal has just been photographed alive for the first time
Greg