https://news.mongabay.com/2025/10/in-memory-of-the-christmas-island-shrew/ Clicky [mongabay_l][mongabay_l] * Features * Videos * Podcasts * Specials * Articles * Shorts Donate * English * Espanol (Spanish) * Francais (French) * Bahasa Indonesia (Indonesian) * Brasil (Portuguese) * India (English) * hiNdii (Hindi) * baaNlaa (Bengali) * Swahili * Videos * Podcasts * Articles * Short News * Feature Stories * The Latest * Explore All * About * Team * Contact * Donate * Subscribe page * Submissions * Privacy Policy * Terms of Use * Advertising * Wild Madagascar * For Kids * Mongabay.org * Reforestation App * Planetary Health Check * Conservation Effectiveness * Mongabay Data Studio In memory of the Christmas Island shrew cover image Rhett Ayers Butler 24 Oct 2025 Australia Founder's briefs Comments Share article Share this article If you liked this story, share it with other people. Facebook Linkedin Threads Whatsapp Reddit Email Page link [https://news.mongaba] * Once abundant on Christmas Island, the tiny, five-gram shrew (Crocidura trichura) filled the night forest with its high, thin cry before vanishing into silence. * Introduced black rats and their parasites decimated the island's native mammals, and by 1908 the shrew was thought extinct, its memory confined to museum drawers and field notes. * Brief rediscoveries in 1958 and 1984 brought fleeting hope, but the last known individuals died in captivity, and no others have been found despite decades of searching. * Its loss, now made official, adds to Australia's grim record of extinctions--a quiet reminder of fragile lives erased by invasion, neglect, and the noise of human expansion. See All Key Ideas It never weighed more than a spoonful of sugar. Five or six grams of life, soft-furred and sharp-nosed, darting among the roots and leaf litter of a tiny island in the Indian Ocean. At night, its voice--a thin, high cry, part bat and part whisper--once filled the forest of Christmas Island. Now the forest is silent. Australia's only shrew, Crocidura trichura, has been declared extinct. Few knew it lived, fewer still that it was Australian. The shrew was a stranger in a land of pouched mammals, a migrant that arrived tens of thousands of years ago, likely clinging to a raft of vegetation from what is now Indonesia. On this isolated outpost, it built a quiet lineage of survivors. When British naturalists arrived in the 1890s, they found the forest alive with its shrill chatter. "Extremely common," they wrote. And then, almost at once, it vanished. The black rats came first, stowaways in bales of hay. With them came a parasite, Trypanosoma lewisi, that swept through the island's naive mammals like a plague. Within years, both native rats were gone. By 1908, the shrew was presumed lost too. Its name lingered only in museum drawers and in the footnotes of field reports. Yet it was not quite gone. Half a century later, in 1958, two shrews appeared as bulldozers tore into the forest for phosphate mining. They were seen, released, and forgotten. Then, in 1984, came a miracle: a live female, found in a clump of fern by biologists clearing a path. For more than a year, she lived in a terrarium, fed on grasshoppers and care. A few months later, a male was caught. The world briefly held its breath for a reunion that might save a species. But the male, sickly and short-tempered, died within weeks. The female lingered alone until she, too, was gone. No others were ever found. Searches in the following decades brought only silence--the kind of silence that deepens until it becomes its own proof. When scientists dissected hundreds of feral cats on the island, not a trace of shrew remained in their stomachs. The Red List, in its latest revision, made official what many already knew in their hearts: Crocidura trichura was no more. To some, the loss of a creature so small may seem inconsequential. Yet its passing adds one more mark to Australia's lamentable record--the thirty-ninth mammal species lost since colonization, more than any other country on Earth. The shrew's absence is a story repeated across islands: an ancient ecosystem undone by the carelessness of arrival, by rats and cats, ants and snakes, by the unthinking traffic of an expanding world. The Christmas Island shrew had survived what many thought impossible. For decades, it persisted unseen--a shadow among roots, defying extinction. It was officially rediscovered, officially lost, and then, improbably, rediscovered again. It endured eighty years of disappearance before the recorders caught up. That endurance was its last act of defiance. In life, it asked for little: a patch of soil, a few beetles, a quiet forest. In death, it leaves questions that are larger than itself. How many other lives flicker out unseen before the world even learns their names? How many others wait somewhere in the darkness, unseen but breathing still? There is always a chance--slim but not zero--that the shrew endures yet, hidden in the damp heart of Christmas Island, trembling but alive. Hope, after all, has a long history of outliving the species it mourns. But the forest is quieter now. And if this really is the end, the last of Australia's shrews will have gone as it lived--small, secret, and almost entirely unnoticed, save for those who loved it enough to listen for its cry. Credits [a81] Rhett Butler Editor Topics AnimalsBiodiversityEndangered SpeciesEnvironmentExtinctionGreen Invasive SpeciesObituaryWildlifeAustralia See Topics Conversations with Mongabay leaders Akhyari Hananto. Courtesy of Hananto Connecting Indonesia's environmental stories to millions Rhett Ayers Butler 13 Oct 2025 Willie Shubert in Madagascar with lemurs at a rehabilitation center. Note: visitors are not permitted to touch lemurs, but lemurs do as they please. Photo by Rhett Ayers Butler Building a global newsroom for a planet in crisis: A conversation with Willie Shubert Rhett Ayers Butler 7 Oct 2025 Torres in the Amazon in 2024. Photo by Rhett Ayers Butler. She built a newsroom across 7 countries--Here's how she did it Rhett Ayers Butler 5 Aug 2025 Akana at Nyungwe National Park in southern Rwanda. While the park is best known for its chimpanzees, as well as owl-faced and colobus monkeys, the canopy walkway offers a unique vantage point over the valley and surrounding forests. Photo by Kuimo Donald. From sports desk to nature's frontlines: David Akana's unlikely path to lead Mongabay Africa Rhett Ayers Butler 23 Jul 2025 Meet the leaders of Mongabay's global newsroom -- people who have built Mongabay into an impactful news organization capable of telling underreported environmental stories relevant to audiences worldwide. This series profiles Mongabay's journalists through candid conversations that explore how we've expanded access to information from hard to reach places, created opportunities for local reporters around [...] Conversations with Mongabay leaders series Free and open access to credible information Learn more Latest articles All articles [RADIOAKTIF] Radioactive leak in Banten exposes workers to danger & reveals regulatory failures Anggita Raissa 25 Oct 2025 Beatriz Matos (left) and Alessandra Sampaio (right), widows of Indigenous expert Bruno Pereira and British journalist Dom Phillips, Feature story Dom Phillips & Bruno Pereira 'would be killed again,' Indigenous leader says Karla Mendes 24 Oct 2025 A yurt with solar panels in the Gobi Desert, Mongolia. How to clean solar panels in arid areas? Waterless systems could improve efficiency Samuel Ogunsona 24 Oct 2025 Christmas Island shrew In memory of the Christmas Island shrew Rhett Ayers Butler 24 Oct 2025 Shoebills are one of the endangered species that rely on Lake Victoria in Uganda. Image by Emilie Chen via Flickr (CC BY-ND 2.0). Has Uganda done enough to prevent pollution of Lake Albert by oil drilling? (commentary) Robert Agenonga 24 Oct 2025 The Andean cat (Leopardus jacobita), an endangered species and one of the rarest felines in the Americas, in the central Andes of Chile. Image courtesy of Rodrigo Villalobos. Researchers fear Chile copper project may threaten rare Andean cat population Aimee Gabay 23 Oct 2025 The Pujada Nickel Mining Project leaves an open-wide brown pit, sandwiched between the Mount Hamiguitan Range Wildlife Sanctuary and Pujada Bay. Nickel mining damage near UNESCO site stirs outrage in southern Philippines Bong S. Sarmiento 23 Oct 2025 A harp seal on ice. Arctic seals edge closer to extinction as sea ice vanishes Keith Anthony Fabro 23 Oct 2025 All articles Subscribe Stay informed with news and inspiration from nature's frontline. Newsletter [mongabay_l][mongabay_l] News formats * Videos * Podcasts * Articles * Specials * Shorts * Features * The Latest About * About * Contact * Donate * Impacts * Newsletters * Submissions * Terms of Use External links * Wild Madagascar * For Kids * Mongabay.org * Reforestation App * Planetary Health Check * Conservation Effectiveness * Mongabay Data Studio Social media * LinkedIn * Instagram * Youtube * X * Facebook * Tiktok * Reddit * BlueSky * Mastodon * Android App * Apple News * RSS / XML (c) 2025 Copyright Conservation news. Mongabay is a U.S.-based non-profit conservation and environmental science news platform. Our EIN or tax ID is 45-3714703. you're currently offline