November 20, 1990

The tropical rain fell in great drenching sheets, hammering the corrugated roof of the clinic in Añasco, Puerto Rico. It was nearly midnight; power had been lost in the storm, and the midwife Elena Morales was working by flashlight when she heard a squeaking, chirping sound. Thinking that it was a rat, she quickly put a compress on the forehead of the mother and went into the next room to check on the newborn baby. As her hand touched the doorknob, she heard the chirping again, and she relaxed; whatever it was, it wasn’t one of those dangerous rodents. Evidently it was just a bird, flying in the window to get out of the rain. Puerto Ricans said that when a bird came to visit a newborn child, it brought good luck.

Elena opened the door to a musky odor. The infant no longer lay in a wicker bassinet, where it had been placed, swaddled in a light blanket. Instead, it lay on the floor. Next to it, a large, dog-like beast crouched like a gargoyle. When it saw Elena, it cocked its heads and stared guardedly at her, but did not flee. In the light of her flashlight Elena saw the blood dripping from its snout. Softly chirping, it bent down and, with a quick shake of its head, tore a ragged chunk of flesh from the baby.

Elena rushed forward, screaming, and the beast fled into the darkness, but long before she reached the bassinet, she could see what had happened to the infant's body, and she knew the child must be dead. The creature ran out the open door and off into the rainy night, clicking and squealing, leaving behind only bloody pad prints.

Later, when she was calmer, Elena Morales realized what it had been that she had seen: the hupia, long thought extinct on this island. Despite the horror she had seen, she considered not reporting the attack. She worried that she might be criticized for leaving the baby unguarded and the door unlocked. It would have been so easy to tell the mother that the baby had asphyxiated, and she report the death on the forms as SIDS: sudden infant death syndrome. This was a syndrome of unexplained death among very young children; it was unremarkable, and her report might well go unchallenged. Ultimately, though, she found that she could not. The mother needed to know. The world needed to know.

When an American such as myself thinks of regions of isolated, unique species, the mind normally turns to far-off places like Madagascar or New Zealand. However, of course, there are literal islands of diversity right next door. Even to this day, the Caribbean is full of unique species; before the appearance of man, it contained a complete ecosystem of bizarre creatures. The apex predator of this environment was the venomous killer shrew, commonly referred to by its native Taíno name, the hupia.

Despite its name, the killer shrew is not a shrew, but a relative of the solenodons. While all Solenodontids are larger than their now extinct Nesophontid cousins, also Caribbean natives, the killer shrew is significantly larger than its near relatives, reaching a size comparable to that of a German shepherd. Currently a predator of that size being located on even the larger islands of the Greater Antilles seems strange. Indeed, its population is currently dwindling as its prey disappear and its habitat is destroyed. It was assumed by early researchers to have lived on the North American mainland in either Central Mexico or Florida and only later have spread to island. While the predator held a tenuous hold on life in these islands, its mainland populations were then wiped out with most of the rest of the North American megafauna. The theory was doubted by some, as paleontological evidence showed that the common ancestor of Solenodontidae and Nesophontidae lived in the Caribbean, thus requiring the killer shrew’s ancestors to both have left and then returned to the archipelago. This interpretation has been overturned with the recent paleontological evidence for creatures commonly known as “Giant Hutia.” Hutia, not to be confused with the hupia, are moderately large rodents currently found throughout Cuba, Hispaniola, Jamaica, and, formerly, Puerto Rico. The so-called giant hutia, traditionally grouped under the likely paraphyletic family Heptaxodontidae, were large herbivores that inhabited many of the major islands. The largest known giant hutia, Amblyrhiza inundata, could have reached sizes comparable to that of the American black bear. These were the killer shrew’s main prey.

The killer shrew’s adaption to its loss of its main food source is impressive, though its future is still in doubt. Populations of varying size and stability are currently known on Cuba, Hispanola, Jamaica, Puerto Rico, and several of the Virgin Islands. The species has been heavily focused upon in research into population dynamics, and how it has adapted and survived the loss of its main food source. It will eat many terrestrial animals, ranging from ground mammals such as hutias to the Cuban rock iguana. The killer shrew’s teeth have specialized for its carnivory, while still retaining the grooves used to transport venom from modified salivary glands into its prey. Like the other solenodons, it will also freely eat carrion. Being omnivorous, the killer shrew will eat roots and fruits; the guava, at least in traditional legend, is considered the killer shrew’s favorite food. As its habitat is encroached upon by man, some populations have also begun to enter urban environments and feed from garbage and the occasional pet.

Like many members of Eulipotyphla, the killer shrew is venomous. As the venom is typically unnecessary when hunting its current prey, whom it can kill physically, it was previously assumed to be used to in intra-species combat, as with platypus. Like other solenodontids, they do not possess a dramatic resistance to their own venom. However, as it is now known, the venom was used with the much larger giant hutias. As the killer shrew is traditionally a solitary, rather than pack, hunter, its venom was likely crucial in bringing down such large animals. The venom has several neurotoxic effects, including partial or total paralysis and convulsion in large doses. It also possesses some anticoagulant properties, cause larger animals to bleed out even if they escape the killer shrew. This is generally assumed to be how the shrew killed giant hutia. The venom is known to affect both reptiles and mammals, and, of course, humans can be seriously harmed and, in the absence of proper medical care, killed. Killer shrew antivenin is currently stocked at most major medical facilities in the Greater Antilles.

The killer shrew has much better eyesight than its insectivorous relatives, though being nocturnal it still has poor color vision. Its broad flattened snout also aids it in maintaining a good sense of smell, allowing it to track its bleeding prey over long distances. Both of these senses are used to find prey and other food sources. It also frequently makes clicking noises, similar to those made by the solenodons when echolocating. While the killer shrew’s vocalizations aren’t conclusively linked to echolocation, it is certainly conceivable and further research is necessary. The killer shrew is also known to howl when attempting to find mates.

In Taíno myth, the hupia were associated with the spirits of the dead and were considered shapeshifters, able to appear as both bats and loved ones, seduce women, and killing their children. Indeed, while the killer shrew can be very dangerous to any age of human, most populations have learned to avoid adults, leading to most attacks occurring on babies and young children. However, there have been several well-documented incidences where killer shrews have killed adults. In the majority of these cases, the attacks occurred after the shrews were transported to a new environment, rendering the shrews disoriented and stressed. Unsure of the availability of resources and the presence of threats, the shrew is much more willing to take the chance to bring down a larger prey animal. A 1959 investigation into the reintegration of the killer shrew into a small island ecosystem ended with several deaths when a drunk assistant accidentally released the killer shrews from their cages prematurely.

In 1974, a London zoologist supervising the transport of a significant number, accidently released the shrews into the city. Unfortunately, over the course of several weeks many were attacked, and as the antivenin was not to be found in the United Kingdom, most died. The attacks died down mainly from a duel-pronged recapture-or extermination method, though enough of the shrews escaped to form a surviving population within Epping Forest. Local politicians and scientists remained divided over how to handle these shrews, with disagreements over whether they would be able to form a surviving breeding population. Many argued that, now that they were removed from the urban environment, the shrews were no longer dangerous. Indeed, aside from a few treated bites, no major attacks occurred within the forest, and a 1979 survey found that none of the shrews remained. Another accidental release in Toronto during October of 1982, the source of which has never been determined but is assumed to be a private collector, was even less successful for the shrews due to the local sub-zero temperatures. However, the Toronto shrew outbreak was blamed by some conspiracy enthusiasts on the use of hormones in agriculture, under the argument that the so-called killer shrews where in fact regular shrews who had been exposed. Of course, little of the public believed such ridiculous claims.

In 2012, the filming of Koh-Lanta: Caraïbes was disrupted by a killer shrew attack, despite one of the survivors of the 1959 incident serving as a consultant. Unfortunately, much of his advice was ignored and proper precautions such as bringing sufficient antivenin along with the crew were not followed through, leading to several deaths.It has also been reported that a series of attacks by killer shrews occurred in West Seneca, New York in late 2016, though details of the incident are not forthcoming at this time.

The killer shrew also has a place in certain subsets of modern catastrophism, parapsychology and paganism. Most of the population is familiar with the name Necronomicon through the works of horror author H.P. Lovecraft, who used it to refer to a fictional text describing his creations. He took this name from the title of a Byzantine translation of the Kitab al-Azif. A text by 8th-Century Yemeni scholar Abd al-Hazred, it is distributed into two parts. The first is a collection of Sumerian and Babylonian mythology, which has proven to be an invaluable source for anthropologists. The second is a collection of bizarre, presumably metaphoric prophecies in many ways more akin to the works of Michel de Nostredame and the Christian Book of Revelation than the Surat Al-Qiyam and other traditional sources of Islamic eschatology. Historians currently dispute whether these prophecies were written by Hazred himself or also collected from other sources. Within in an early passage of the prophetic half of the text, Hazred references a giant two-headed rat whose bites cause disease, who heralds the monsters and events detailed in further throughout the text. In the most widely-known historical translation, written in Latin, this creature is referred to as a dux, Latin for leader. Among certain esoteric groups, such as the Colmillos de la Hidra, the killer shrew is identified with this herald by authors equating its size and its venomous bite with a disease-causing one, along with some contextual information. No explanation is typically provided for the second head. An English translation, known as the Simon Necronomicon, was published academically in 1927, but did not reach the public until 1938, where it quickly was disseminated into different underground movements. The Simon translation opts to keep dux untranslated, instead rendering it a name. Thus, it is not uncommon to see the killer shrew referenced as the Dux of Hazred. Obviously, such things have no place in more scientific circles.