Leah Collett, An MPhil student from our Faculty of Science and Technology's Department of Life Sciences, has recently found her work in Tanzania becoming the focus of a BBC wildlife programme.

The crew from BBC Two's "Decade of Discovery" travelled to Tanzania to film the newest species of Giant Sengi, or Elephant Shrew, called the Diurnal Grey-faced Sengi, which was first discovered in 2007 by Anglia Research fellow Dr Trevor Jones and Dr Francesco Rovero, from the Trento Museum in Italy. The programme tells the stories of ten extraordinary animal species discovered in the last decade and aired on BBC Two on Tuesday 14th December.

Whilst completing her Mphil exploring the butterfly assemblages of different habitats in Mikumi National Park, Tanzania, Leah also worked as an intern at the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) where she co-authored a research paper on the impacts of conservation on vertebrate species. Leah was then invited by Dr Rovero to assist a study funded by the Mohamed bin Zayed Species Conservation Fund to discover more about the Shrew's daily activity patterns, nest use and how male and female pairs of shrews interact in their overlapping home regions.

The programme makers filmed Dr Rovera explaining how the creature was discovered by using camera traps and then subsequently described. Leah was filmed talking about the continuing research being conducted by the team after the discovery of the species.

Elephant Shrews are small insect-eating mammals native to Africa, named due to their long noses resemblance to an Elephant's trunk. The programme will also include the Kipunji, the new species (and genus) of Monkey discovered by Trevor Jones and Dr Tim Davenport of the Wildlife Conservation Society, Tanzania in 2005.

Further information about our Department of Life Sciences