From SW Virginia Wildlife Rehab Center of Roanoke

This little Opossum joey had a rough start to life. Her mama was likely hit by a vehicle. Still too young to be on her own, was left to wander alone in the wild. At some point, she must have brushed into a brood of “seed ticks” (newly-hatched tick larvae which sometimes number in the thousands where they are laid). And then, she got caught in a thunderstorm.

Tough break!

The morning after the storm, she finally got a stroke of luck: She was found by a kind rescuer who recognized that she needed help. They kept her contained and warm, and brought her to us ASAP.

On arrival at our wildlife hospital, we realized that this poor creature was absolutely covered in seed ticks! They were in her ears, on her nose, lips, fur, in her POUCH, and we even found a few crawling on her eyeballs.

One of our staff painstakingly tweezed off 263(!) tick larvae from her little body. The photo of a jar of insecticide and seed ticks is just from Round 2 of tick removal, since she needed some breaks in between de- ticking sessions. This was supplemented with chemical treatment, which helped to kill any leftover ticks.

MYTH: “Opossums love to eat ticks!”

FACT: They don’t actually sniff out ticks to eat. Adult Opossums will groom their own bodies to remove ticks, but that’s about it.

The original study that caused this myth was NOT studying what wild Opossums eat. It was a Lyme Disease study which involved introducing ticks to the bodies of captive wildlife in small enclosures.

It wasn’t until several follow-up studies documented the gut contents of over 1,200(!) WILD-ranging Opossums that we realized that not a single tick was found in their GI tracts.

So what are Opossums good for? As the Outdoor Illinois Journal puts so eloquently, "Opossums do not need to validate their existence by eating ticks like some sort of Pac-Man of the forest. They do not need to earn their keep. They are an important part of our ecosystems for other reasons, like scavenging, seed dispersal and as prey for other species.

The Outdoor Illinois Journal article is excellent and easy to read! I greatly encourage you so to check it out. It highlights some good research, bad research, and problems that can arise from the perpetuation of that bad research.