'Nature's garbage men': Opossums are plentiful, productive and really, most sincerely, odd

Waffles (left) and Mavis, the Little Rock Zoo’s 3-year-old Virginia opossums, are protected from parasites by monthly doses of Revolution and occasionally bathed with dog shampoo.
Waffles (left) and Mavis, the Little Rock Zoo’s 3-year-old Virginia opossums, are protected from parasites by monthly doses of Revolution and occasionally bathed with dog shampoo.

We know what we mean when we talk about the possum, but what we mean isn't the possum.

American possums are not possums. They're opossums.



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"The O is not silent," says Hannah Baker, a bit severely. As an education-animal care specialist for the Little Rock Zoo, she speaks on behalf of Waffles and Mavis, opossums.

Possums live in Australia and similar not-here places. Like America's Virginia opossums, the 70 or so varieties of Aussie possums are marsupials, birthing honeybee-size, naked "joeys" that finish growing internal organs while in a pouch on the mother's belly. But otherwise the species are utterly unrelated.

Virginia opossums play possum. None of the Aussie animals plays possum. But they can smack, click, hiss, chatter, cough or growl like a swamp dinosaur about to eat Bambi (listen here: bit.ly/2oOfLw0). Virginia opossums cannot make Bambi-eater noises.

"It is not the same animal," Baker says.

She has delivered this news many times, but it doesn't stick. Arkansans say "possum." Even Blake Sasse, the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission's go-to guy for furbearers, uses the P-word in casual contexts.

And the context in which Arkansans encounter North America's only native marsupial is all kinds of casual: Opossums occur statewide. "We do not breed them because they're in no threat in the wild, especially around here," Baker says.

Which is great, she says, because these are "Nature's garbage men."

They gobble down an awful lot of awful things -- carcasses, rotting fruit, elderly or not-yet-hatched cockroaches, ticks. Anything that doesn't get away or eat them first. If Bambi was dead, yes, Virginia opossums would eat Bambi.

Which makes the species' self-defense system ironic, to say the least:

1) run until cornered,

2) hiss while displaying 50 very pointy but small teeth and then, after that fails,

3) growl,

4) screech,

5) feign death.

But then, they aren't deep thinkers (see accompanying story).

Their bodies are well built for climbing, with strong nails, opposable thumbs on all four feet and a clasping, prehensile tail. But because they're opportunistic in every habit, opossums spend a fair amount of time on the ground, waddling from one eating opportunity to the next.

In their book The Opossum: Its Amazing Story, William J. and Winifred A. Krause estimate their top land speed at 3.5 mph -- a quick shamble. The gait is a primitive plantigrade-quadrupedal rock 'n' roll.

"Since they're scavengers, their nose is how they find their food. They have no reason to be fast," Baker explains. "They don't have to catch anything."

Meanwhile, being good at smelling rot draws them to humans and to our roads. Where they die. In part, Baker says, because some of us see no harm in chucking apple cores out the windows of our two-ton opossum-squishers.

All these attributes add up to high mortality. So how are opossums so common? How has this species's range expanded from Central America to Ontario (bit.ly/2pb3DZc)?

Because they eat anything and breed like rabbits, Sasse says.

At 3 years old, Waffles and Mavis are switching to the senior blend Nutro Max cat food. Zoo opossums can reach 8 years, but "most of the time 3, 4 years is about average for us," Baker says.

They sleep in a hammock slung between wire walls in an indoor kennel and so, unlike wild opossums, aren't producing one or two litters a year. But given an oddity of their anatomy, it's better not to be explaining where baby opossums come from to random crowds of schoolkids. If you must know, Arkansas Mammals: Their Natural History, Classification and Distribution (University of Arkansas Press, 1990) describes the male member as forked to match the female's two reproductive canals. This may have given rise to the myth that opossums "breed through the nose," the book states.

Females can give birth to as many as 25 joeys, but Arkansas Mammals says the pouch accommodates only 13. Extras die.

Canadian biologist Seabrooke Leckie, co-author of Peterson Field Guide to Moths of Northeastern North America, a few years back blogged about this life lottery after watching a frost-bitten opossum hoover up suet scraps below her bird feeder:

"The pouch faces backwards in possums," she wrote, "because when the young are born (after only 12-13 days gestation! They're so small when born that the whole litter will fit into a teaspoon), they must pull themselves, grabbing the mother's fur, into the mother's pouch and find a nipple to feed from. They remain attached there for several weeks.

"Opossums have 13 nipples, arranged with 12 in a circle and one in the centre."

Sasse says the typical litter is seven to nine. The mother doesn't root around in her pouch to tend them.

After about 60 days of constant suckling, mouse-size joeys can detach from the teats. In another 10 days, rat-size joeys wriggle in and out of the pouch. Their bodies are still light enough that their tails help them cling to the mother's fur and ride on her back. But some fall off and get left behind.

"After about three months they've left the mother," Sasse says. "They get gone pretty fast."

BY THE WAY

Adult opossums cannot hang by their tails.

COZY LIFE

Waffles and Mavis were freakishly lucky. Baker remembers when "the sisters" arrived at the zoo as mouse-size joeys provided by the Game and Fish Commission. If she and co-workers hadn't hand-fed them, "they would have died for sure. They were being tube-fed all hours of the day and night, and we were waking up to feed them."

They aren't sisters. Mavis was found staggering about alone and Waffles with her siblings and dead mother.

To tell them apart: Waffles' tail is fat and gray as a fat gray parsnip, and her facial fur suggests smoky eye makeup. She's larger, but that's not to call Mavis svelte. Both are "chunky girls," as animal keeper Blythe Lalley puts it.

Although wild opossums hole up in cold weather (in attics, sheds, other animals' abandoned burrows, chicken houses), the species Didelphis virginiana doesn't hibernate, which explains why the one Leckie watched had lost its tail tip to frostbite. Sasse says Arkansas opossums in general aren't as weather-tattered as their northern cousins.

Baker says the zoo's "spokespossums" don't develop a winter coat. "They don't shed. We never brush them. And they're a lot softer than they look."

"They love bananas," she says. "They're on a rotation of different proteins. They get either cat food, fish, boiled eggs or live bugs -- crickets and superworms [swiped from the penguins]. And every day they're also eating carrots, kiwi -- any sort of fruit and vegetable."

They have personalities. Waffles is more outgoing, less likely to hiss. "Mavis is a little more reserved," Baker says.

NIGHT LIFE

Wild opossums are victimized by parasites: ticks, lice, fleas, flukes, roundworms and tapeworms. But unlike raccoons and skunks, there's no reason to assume a day-trotting opossum is sick. They are mostly nocturnal, Sasse says, but "if someone told me there's one running around in the front yard right now, it wouldn't surprise me too much."

"And, a fun fact that a lot of people don't realize, their body temperature is too low to carry rabies," Baker says.

With a body temperature of about 92 degrees, opossums also are unaffected by most snake venoms. "So they can actually help you with a snake problem," she says.

Not that they'll fight the snakes. They like the same food.

And they smell it from afar. In 1973, when the U.S. Army was doing due diligence while building a program using dogs as mine detectors, three Virginia opossums were among representatives of 16 species scientists at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio considered as alternatives to German shepherds. The badger, coatimundi and the raccoons were too likely to bite. The 400-pound Duroc pig was too big; and even mini-pigs root when they're excited, so that ruled out pigs. (See bit.ly/2oEtnvQ.)

But we're talking about opossums. Which Arkansans like to do. Ask your Facebook friends.

TALE AFTER TALE

In Hot Springs, Barbara Battle Larkin once opened the cabinet beneath her sink to see "a big ol' possum" hissing at her.

Angela Cummings of Little Rock has met them in the basement of her Quapaw Quarter home and also in its attic. Last summer, she met one while walking her dog: She reached for a fig as she passed a tree.

"The fingers of my left hand felt wet and slimy," Cummings says. "I stopped, looked up and saw I had three fingers in the mouth of a possum! We were both stunned. He began to hiss as I sat down on the curb to catch my breath and lower my blood pressure."

In Magnolia, Angela Stone Adcock set up a live trap to catch raccoons and caught the same enraged baby opossum five nights in a row.

Or did she? Two summers ago, photographer Karen Segrave's cat Callisto brought rat-size joeys to the porch nightly for more than a week. Freed from his mouth unharmed, the freaked-out babies promptly keeled over as though dead. But later they quietly trundled off.

Were they all the same joey? She marked tails with nail polish.

"Turns out there were several different critters, and a few he brought home multiple times," she says. "You'd think they would have wised up and moved on."

COMA MOMENTS

Sam and Tracy Cooper's ambitious Maine coon cat Alfred presented them a dead opossum he'd harvested in their west Little Rock neighborhood. It smelled quite dead. But when Sam bent to shovel it up, "the chase was on," Tracy chortles.

Opossums do not fake their deaths deliberately. Panic triggers a biochemical coma that can last minutes or up to four hours. Muscles lock; eyes fix; the tongue lolls. Death-scented drool adds a nice touch.

Sometimes it works. Their main predators are humans, foxes and large cats, which like a bit of sport. Unless they're hungry, dogs are as likely to roll on a dead thing as eat it. But raptors don't lose interest, and cars aren't looking.

Hand-raised by humans and fed treats on stage before amphitheaters of squealing children, Waffles and Mavis do not panic. And they're roommates with Maple, the angry, angry groundhog that awakens from hibernation full of vociferous hostility. Although totally vegan, Maple ranks with the zoo's more dangerous animals.

And yet Waffles and Mavis have never played possum. Never in their lives.

ActiveStyle on 04/24/2017

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