The Naming of the Shrew
There's a new mammal in Alaska.
When its scientific name appears in a research journal, the Alaska tiny shrew will officially join bowhead whales, brown bears, and buffalo as one of Alaska's wild creatures that grows hair and has the ability to produce milk for its young.
Though new to the list of Alaska mammals, the Alaska tiny shrew didn't recently scamper over the border. The shrew has been here a long time; but it's easy to hide when you weigh less than a dime.
The shrew's scurry to species status began in 1987. That's when Galena biologist Tim Osborne found a smaller-than-normal shrew in one of his pit traps. A pit trap is a metal cone shoved in the ground that proves inescapable to small animals that tumble in. Osborne, who still works in Galena for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, set several traps in his back yard to see what they would produce for his daughter's science project.
Osborne thought the small creature was probably an immature masked shrew, but its short body length-about half as long as a pen, tail included-prompted him to preserve it.
"Something tweaked me," Osborne said from Galena recently. "I saved the skin and skeleton."
He mailed the shrew's diminutive carcass to the University of Alaska Museum, where it was placed in a drawer with other stuffed shrews from throughout Alaska.
It rested in the dark cabinet until Russian zoologist Nikolai Dokuchaev of Magadan visited the museum's basement collection in 1993. While examining some of the 2,000 shrew remains at the museum, Dokuchaev noticed the shrew Osborne captured greatly resembled a shrew of the Russian Far East. It had never been known to exist in Alaska, or even North America.
Because new species of mammal don't pop up very often, the tiny brown shrew--the smallest mammal in the museum's collection-became sort of a celebrity, inspiring news stories in Alaska and appearing in a scientific journal in Russia.
At first glance, Dokuchaev classified the shrew as a tiny Asian shrew. Its scientific name, Sorex minutissimus, means "most minute shrew." After comparing skulls and teeth of the Alaska shrews and the Asian shrews with a dissecting microscope, however, Dokuchaev noticed subtle differences in the spacing of their teeth.
Though slight, those differences were enough to inspire Dokuchaev to suggest the Alaska version shouldn't be lumped with its Russian counterparts. The Alaska tiny shrew now has one last hurdle to jump before it becomes a new species: its Latin name has to appear in a respected scientific publication.
Museum Mammal Collection Manager Gordon Jarrell is currently editing a paper Dokuchaev is submitting to the Journal of Mammalogy. Once the Alaska tiny shrew's Latin name is published there, "it's as official as it gets," Jarrell said. Zoologists may debate the shrews' differences, but the Alaska tiny shrew will be a new species until proven otherwise.
Even though Alaskans will soon call our shrew by name, we probably won't see one. Though shrews (especially masked shrews) are among the most common mammals in the state, the type that fell into Tim Osborne's trap is rare. In over a decade of trapping shrews, voles and other owl food, Osborne captured only two Alaska tiny shrews amidst hundreds of other shrews. Five more Alaska tiny shrews were captured near Ruby and on the upper Susitina River. Of the seven, four are at the UA Museum and three reside at the Burke Museum in Seattle.
As for the Latin name of the Alaska tiny shrew, you'll have to wait until it's published in the Journal of Mammalogy. This forum isn't the proper one for its unveiling.
