ONE OF THE WORLD’S OLDEST MAMMALS
About three weeks ago, Michael called my attention to one of the cat areas in our shelter and pointed to a baby possum (or opossum.) It was not playing dead, even surrounded by our three black juvenile male brothers, though it had a noticeable wound on its right side. I picked it up by its tail and nestled it in my hand. We put some antibiotic spray on its sore and laid it out in the backyard. I worried for days about its survival. Then about a week later it appeared again. How it got into our shelter area is still a mystery. Michael called me and before I could ask him to put it in safe keeping until I got there, he told me he had released it to the other side of the parking lot in the bushes. Although, “he” has not yet returned, I was told that another one got in, and even though it had no marks of injury it was deceased.
Over 70 million years ago, when dinosaurs were in existence, so were possums! They are sometimes referred to as the only living fossil. Many find them to be ugly, even repulsive, with their prehensile hairless tail (that they use for grasping, balancing, and carrying,) their long snouts and fifty teeth-more than any North American mammal, and scraggily body hair. Some, like myself, look upon them as intriguing. I took care of a mature possum this past winter. I put a Styrofoam box with a hole and bedding where he was hiding under our deck, to help keep him or her warm. Their hairless tail and ears are prone to frostbite, and their scantily covered body leads to hypothermia. I don’t know whether he used it and I don’t know what became of him. My cats, when in our big yard, did not seem bothered by his presence. Possums are not susceptible to rabies as their low body temperature does not make them an ideal host. And a protein in their blood protects them from snake venom. Testing is being done to synthesize this protein to make an antivenom for humans.
Possums are not aggressive or destructive and are fastidious groomers. They help keep areas clean and lessen the population of insects like ticks (they can consume as many as 4,000 a week! and are not susceptible to lymes disease), garden pests like slugs, beetles, crickets, and they eat cockroaches, love snails, eat rodents and have earned the nickname “Nature’s Little Sanitation Engineer.” For more information about what they can and should not eat, check out the site, THIRTEEN THINGS POSSSUM LIKE TO EAT. They are the only North American marsupial, having a pouch for carrying their young, and as such are related to Kangaroos and Koalas. Opossums gestate for 11-13 days, and the babies are so small when born that twenty of them fit in a teaspoon. The mother can have as many as 25 offspring, but she only has 13 nipples, so whichever babies don’t latch on will die. The survivors latch on for 50-70 days. As they mature, they will stay with the mother, often riding on her back, for another 120 days at which point they become independent, but are targets to predators, so again survival is risky.
While there are 65 species of opossums, the Didelphis virginiana, the Virginia opossum, is the one native to North America. Early Virginians use to hunt and eat them. Their life span is only one to two years mainly because of harm that befalls them. Normally a possum will bare its teeth or run from danger. A surprise threat, however, causes the possum “to play dead” which is really an involuntary catatonic state whereby the possum faints and emits a strong smell from its anus, and this state can last for minutes or hours, making a possum unable to protect itself from an aggressive predator like a dog.
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