California students capture palm-sized underground mammal alive on camera for the first time
Three undergraduate students came up with an idea to capture the elusive Mount Lyell shrew, native to the Eastern Sierra Nevada region, as part of their fall 2024 project. Vishal Subramanyan, Prakrit Jain and Harper Forbes laid out over 100 traps last November and checked them every two hours, for three days and four nights, to photograph the tiny creatures.
"The hardest part of getting the photos was one, they're incredibly fast cuz they're always running around," Subramanyan told CBS News.
Another reason the Mount Lynell shrews had never been captured alive on camera is that they have an incredibly fast metabolism, Subramanyan said. When the students learned that this particular animal had never been photographed before, they devised a plan.
Researchers have set up similar pitfall traps to capture the shrews, but if they're left in the trap for more than two hours, they'll simply starve to death. That's why Subramanyan, Jain and Forbes had to check their traps every two hours.
To take the photos, the students set up a white background on the bottom of a box, using glass on the top so they could photograph through it. They also had a terrarium with soil and mealworms for the shrews.
The tiny mammals are active through day and night because they have to constantly feed on insects and arachnids to survive. Another challenge in getting the photos were cold fingers, Subramanyan said.
Temperatures in the mountain fell to 15 degrees during the expedition funded with the help of Cal Academy. The students were part of the organization's inaugural California Creators for Nature program that aims to engage people on social media in conversations about nature, climate and environmental justice.
In addition to helping raise awareness about the small mammals facing threats from climate change — with 89% projected loss of its habitat by the 2080s, according to UC Berkeley — Subramanyan said his photos will be entered into scientific databases, and they will help make it easier for researchers to identify species of the shrews.
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