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Opossums eat insects, rodents, birds, eggs, frogs, plants, fruits and grain. Some species may eat the skeletal remains of rodents and roadkill animals to fulfill their calcium requirements. [ 45 ] In captivity, opossums will eat practically anything including dog and cat food, livestock fodder and discarded human food scraps and waste.
Newly hatched young also instinctively show this behaviour when rats try to eat them. [12] In mammals, the Virginia opossum (commonly known simply as possums) is perhaps the best known example of defensive thanatosis. "Playing possum" is an idiomatic phrase which means "pretending to be dead". [13]
Like raccoons, opossums can be found in urban environments, where they eat pet food, rotten fruit, and human garbage. They also are considered a common predator of poultry farming in North America. [ 58 ] [ 59 ] Research suggests that proximity to humans causes an increase in body size for opossums living in or near urban environments. [ 60 ]
The common opossum (Didelphis marsupialis), also called the southern or black-eared opossum [2] or gambá, and sometimes called a possum, is a marsupial species living from the northeast of Mexico to Bolivia (reaching the coast of the South Pacific Ocean to the central coast of Peru), including Trinidad and Tobago and the Windwards in the Caribbean, [2] where it is called manicou. [3]
Shrew opossums (also known as rat opossums or caenolestids) are about the size of a small rat (9–14 cm long), with thin limbs, a long, pointed snout and a slender, hairy tail. They are largely carnivorous, being active hunters of insects , earthworms , and small vertebrates.
Brushtail possums may eat three or four different plant species during a foraging trip, unlike some other arboreal marsupials, such as the koala and the greater glider, which focus on single species. The brushtail possum's rounded molars cannot cut Eucalyptus leaves as finely as more specialised feeders. They are more adapted to crushing their ...
The Possum Pie is the Natural State's signature dessert with an animal in its name but not in the ingredients. Fox News Digital spoke to an Arkansas baker who describes what's actually in it.
The term "opossum" is used to refer to American species (though "possum" is a common abbreviation), while similar Australian species are properly called "possums". Isolated petrosals of Djarthia murgonensis , Australia's oldest marsupial fossils [ 71 ] Dentition of the herbivorous eastern grey kangaroo, as illustrated in Knight's Sketches in ...