Still other scientists are intrigued by the opossum’s casually relentless adaptability, the way a basically tropical mammal has managed to steadily expand its range into wintry New England, the Midwest and beyond. “Sixty or seventy years ago, there weren’t any around here,” said Todd K. Fuller of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. But in a recent four-year study of opossum demographics around Amherst, Dr. Fuller’s graduate student, Leann Kanda, found an impressive marsupial density, 25 to 50 adults per square mile.
One key to the opossum’s success is that it’s low-key — a nocturnal forager that shies away from other animals, is nonterritorial and avoids fights. If cornered, an opossum may resort to its legendary talent for playing possum, an autonomic response, like fainting, in which the animal falls to its side with its mouth adrool, excretes droppings and a foul odor, and remains in a deathlike state of curled catatonia for minutes to hours, until finally it revives beginning with a twitch of the ears….
No matter what they eat, opossums are poor at storing body fat, and as the Fuller team discovered, they survive harsh winters only by taking advantage of the happenstance scraps and warm shelter that humans supply.
Click through and read the whole thing. I struggled to pick parts to excerpt. I promise this will be the most fascinating thing you read about opossums all day.
As for the excerpt: The article doesn’t connect the dots, but I take this to mean that opossums didn’t spread this far north until humans started producing enough waste in the winter to sustain opossum life. That’s kind of awesome, and pretty damn enterprising on the part of the opossums.
The article says opossums have remained relatively unchanged for about 60 million years, and yet sometime in the last century, some cunning opossum noticed a big heap of delicious garbage left out for pickup on Tuesday night and was all, “hey, other opossums! There’s good eatin’ up here in Massachusetts. And these suckers are even building sheds for us.”
Probably it didn’t go down exactly like that, but it’s pretty cool nonetheless.
Also I left the description of opossums doing their main thing in the excerpt because it’s awesome. Who among us, when faced with an unpleasant situation, hasn’t wanted to excrete foul odors and resort to “a deathlike state of curled catatonia for minutes to hours”?
The Toadies, because now the song’s in my head:
Tedquarters 