Its coat combines dark silvery gray, white, and dark reddish-brown in individual hairs, and its tail is slightly two-toned. Records place this shrew in highland rainforest.
The proximal half of each dorsal hair is dark silvery gray, a white band crosses the middle, and the tips are dark reddish brown. Ventral hairs have dark silvery-gray bases and blond tips. The tail is slightly bicolored.
The Tropical Least Shrew also occurs in lowland riparian forest in southern Guatemala. The El Pajal river-bank site in Taxisco lies at 410 metres above sea level. In a landscape containing cultivated pasture and sugarcane, river-side forest provides a documented locality for this small mammal.
A 2018 paper reported an adult male caught during a mammal inventory in January 2013. Researchers measured its body and skull and compared it with relatives to identify it as Cryptotis tropicalis. The preserved specimen was deposited in a Mexican research collection, making the identification available for checking.
Compiling older records revealed a 1976 specimen from another southern lowland locality about 16.5 kilometres away. The records were 37 years apart. Mapping them together demonstrated lowland occurrence in a species often associated with higher elevations, showing how museum material and new surveys complement each other.
An extinction-risk assessment has not been added yet.
The 2018 field report documented this shrew in riparian forest surrounded by cultivated pasture and sugarcane. The riparian-forest record highlights the need to include remaining lowland forest in surveys. Retaining such forest and monitoring occurrence and responses to surrounding land-use change would support conservation.