“Unveiling Nature’s Secret: Watch the Rare Shrew Species Captured on Camera for the Very First Time!”
“One of the most challenging parts was the lack of sleep,” Subramanyan told All That’s Interesting. “Because shrews have such fast metabolisms, they will die if they spend more than two hours in a trap unattended. This means we needed to check traps every two hours, meaning we could not sleep for more than two hours at a time… In total, we slept only about eight hours the whole trip. Another major challenge was the cold. We had to stay up through the nights, where temperatures often dropped down to 15 degrees.”
But it was worth it. Over the course of their three-day expedition, the young researchers succeeded in capturing four different species of shrew: the vagrant shrew, montane shrew, Merriam’s shrew — and the highly elusive Mount Lyell shrew.
Photographing The Mount Lyell Shrew For The Very First Time
Vishal Subramanyan, Prakrit Jain, Harper ForbesSorex lyelli, better known as the Mount Lyell shrew.
All in all, the mission to photograph the Mount Lyell shrew was a success. Having lured six of the elusive creatures into pitfall traps baited with cat food and mealworms, Subramanyan, Jain, and Forbes documented them.
“We were surprised at how many of them we caught,” Subramanyan told All That’s Interesting, “and the frequency in which we observed them stashing their food, something not previously documented in this species.”
To be sure that they had captured a Mount Lyell shrew — and not a different kind of shrew — the team took small samples from the shrews’ tails for DNA testing. They also took the opportunity to record measurements of the shrews’ length and ear size, something that had previously only been done on dead specimens.
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