JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
For more than 100 years, scientists have known about a tiny mammal living in the mountains around Yosemite National Park. California even designated it a species of special concern. But nobody had ever seen the Mount Lyell shrew.
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.
SUBRAMANYAN: I think this would be a little crazy, but it would also be really cool to, you know, document this animal that's never been photographed alive.
PFEIFFER: 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.
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SUBRAMANYAN: We got a shrew.
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.
SUMMERS: And if you were wondering what the Mount Lyell shrew actually looks like, check out the social media sites of the California Academy of Sciences.
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