Now it's time to get ready for the close-up.
The rare Mount Lyell shrew was recently photographed for the first time by a group of university students.
The pointy-nosed, beady-eyed, grey-brown creature of the Sierra Nevada region was the only mammal known from California that had never been captured on camera. According to SF Gate.
That all changed in November, when students (two from the University of California, Berkeley and one from the University of Arizona) captured a tiny animal that was only 9 to 10 centimeters long and weighed 2 to 3 grams.
Vishal Subramanyan, 22, one of the students, told the media that this may be the first time in history that humans have seen the creature, named after Mount Lyell in Yosemite National Park. told.
“So it's very likely one of California's least well-known mammal species,” he says.
Subramanyan and his friends Prakrit Jain, 20, and Harper Forbes, 22, purposefully set out to discover this species after learning that it had never been photographed before, and the California Fish and Wildlife Department. Permission was obtained from the Bureau of Biological Sciences.
The trio set traps filled with cat food and mealworms in the Eastern Sierra desert and caught them. five lyells There were also 10 shrews from three other species.
Shrews have very fast metabolisms and will die if they don't eat every two hours, so the group tried not to sleep for more than two hours at a time to make sure the traps had food in them.
“It was like go, go, go,” Subramanyan told SFGate.
“We'd catch some shrews, photograph them, release them, and by that time we'd have more. So it was pretty non-stop.”
To prove that the creature the students photographed was actually Lyell, the California Academy of Sciences conducted genetic testing on a small piece of its tail.
This elusive animal lives in the eastern Sierra Nevada region and spends most of its time underground. It was first discovered more than a century ago by Clinton Hart Merriam, a zoologist from New York City known as the “father of mammalogy.”
The students hope their project will shed more light on the tiny creatures that the state considers dangerous. Mammal species of special concern And its preservation.
“Photography is critical to cataloging the rapidly changing biodiversity of our planet,” Subramanyan told the magazine.
“When it comes to California shrews, good photos are few and far between, so taking photos that have never actually been taken before will help the public understand these animals and foster a connection with them.” It will be helpful.”
