Virginia Opossum

Habitat and Diet

Virginia opposums are found in North America and Central America, and are invasive to the United States. The thing about possums is that they can pretty much live anywhere. The enviorments they live in tend to be more temprate climates with a solid amount of rainfall, but can and will operate in cold enviorments by holeling up in their dens. They prefer thick woodlands with water sources. They can also live in deserts and wetlands, as well as man made enviorments like farm fields and suburbs. They like bushes and trees that they can nest in. They can also be found nesting in sewage systems. Since possums are omnivorous, they have a large diverse diet including smaller mammals, fruit, birds, seeds, insects, plant matieral, worms, or repltiles and amphibians. In urban enviorments they will eat pet food, garbage food, or bird seed. They are oppurtunistic eaters, eating pretty much anything they find. They can also use their sharp claws to dig up little critters to eat, or climb treest to reach birds on the branches. They eat several times a day.  Not as much as something like a wolverine, but still quite a bit. Natural predators of the virginia opposom include raptors like owls and hawks, canines like foxes and dogs, as well as cats occasionally.

Social Structure and Reproduction

Virginia opposums are nocturnal solitary creatures. While they tend to wander on their lonesome, they some time gather together and just sort of tolerate each other. Males tend to be more aggresive towards other possums, because they like to compete against each other for mates. When they attempt to attract mates, they making sort of a clicking sound with their mouths, and females breed about 2-3 times a year. Virginia opposum litters usually have 8-9 babies. They start by staying in the mothers pouch and drink her milk, then after about 2 months, they climb on to their mothers back. During this time, they learn how to survive in the wild from watching their mother. The fathers don't help raise the children. They then leave about 3 months later from when they leave their moms pouch. They sexually mature  about a year after they're born. Unfortunatley, virginia opposum babies have a high mortaility rate. Only about 1 in 10 opposums survive until adulthood. A more fun but strange fact, since possums are marsupials, they have 2 sets of reproductive organs. Females also have 13 teets.

Dangers to the Virginia Opossum

Possums have a short life span, but the reason for their death is not only ageing. Opposum's are victim to a variety of predators as mentioned before. Possums do have the famous survival techinque called playing dead, but this doesn't always work. In addition, possums are often victim to being killed by cars, to probably little suprise. They are also  vulnerable to a variety of diseases and parasites such as tuberculosis, spotted feaver, and chagas. There's also more traditional deaths that happen such as starvation or exposure to cold. Their skinless ears doesn't help. Unlike other some species, opposums don't really have dangerous mating competition. In fact they don't really compete with eachother at all and kind of just leave eachother alone with the exception of males sometimes establishing territory for the mate they want. Though they often due compete against racoons for food. This likely happens because both species fucntion well in colonized enviorments and have similar omnivorous diets. They don't really have any threats from invasive species either, considering that they are an invasive species themself. Depsite the fact that they die literally all of the time, both faking death and dying acutally, they have a stable population and a stable population trend, following the usual line that population trends take. The reason Virginia opossums can thrive population wise, is just because they reproduce so much. Mothers can sometimes have 25 babies in one litter. So while most of them don't survive to adult hood, at least some will. There's not a population estimate for virginia opossums in the world or in the USA, but there are a lot of them, consdiering how common they are to see.

Relationship with Humans

Possums are seen as vermin in many places, but like all forms of vermin some people just love them because they are little trash goblins. Possums will raid trash cans, eat pet food, and sometimes just get into your house unexplicably. In other words, virginia opposums are very simular to raccons in the ways that they interact with humans. They're theives, stealing food from us and being chaotic. Possums are also killed by cars often, as mentioned before, and this can cause issues in streets for traffic or road cleaners. Because of this, some people will attempt to kill possums to keep them out of their yard or home. Despite their bad reputation, Virginia opossums are actually quite helpful to humans in some ways. Virginia opposums eat species that are dangerous to humans, such as insects and ticks that carry deadly diseases, various sorts of garden pests, and even snakes and scorpions. Their immunity to venom makes them sort of the snake fighter of our country, simular to how mongooses are the snake fighters of other countries. They also eat carcasses that carry diseases bad for humans. Because of these various benefits, it's actually illegal to kill possums in many states, and it is recomended to trap a problem possum live and relocate it to a wooded area. As far as we're aware, we've been seeing possums since the origin of humanity in the americas. Opposums are recognized as various different things in some native american cultures, ranging from fools, to tricksters, to symbols of fertility, to bringers of fire. And there have been accounts of european settlers interacting with virginia opposums, one example mentioned before that was a description of a possum being a mix between a pig, cat, or a rat. Some colonists called it the "White Faced Beast." So opposums have a deep history of profiting off our success.