California students capture palm-sized underground mammal alive on camera for the first time

A palm-sized mammal that lives underground in California has been caught 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. He and Jain were already taking photos of small mammals for their mammalogy class when they learned that this particular animal had never been photographed before, so 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. Subramanyan was 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.

“There’s a fair number of animals in the U.S. that have never had their photos taken, or there are very little or poor quality photos,” Jain said, adding that he hopes to continue taking photos of wildlife to aid conservation efforts.

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 — the students said the photos will be entered into scientific databases, and they will help make it easier for researchers to identify species of the shrews.

The shrews are “highly prolific predators” that can eat several times their body mass on a daily basis, Jain said. He noted they also serve as an important part in the food chain for other predators such as snakes, owls and wild cats.