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[22] [24] Heart rate drops by half, and breathing rate is so slow and shallow it is hardly detectable. [21] Death feigning normally stops when the threat withdraws, and it can last for several hours. [ 21 ] [ 24 ] Besides discouraging animals that eat live prey, playing possum also convinces some large animals that the opossum is no threat to ...
The opossum lifespan is unusually short for a mammal of its size, usually only one to two years in the wild and as long as four or more years in captivity. Senescence is rapid. [37] Opossums are moderately sexually dimorphic with males usually being larger, heavier, and having larger canines than females. [36]
The subspecies, today Caluromys derbianus pallidus, was originally described as Philander laniger pallidus, and was described two years before pallidus, in 1899. This makes the name pallidus preoccupied, so in 2020 Alfred L. Gardner and José Ramírez-Pulido decided to make a new species name for this taxa, choosing Philander vossi .
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This shrew opossum lacks a marsupium [9] (young are attached to the nipples) and has seven nipples, unlike the four typical of other caenolestids. [5] The tail helps in balancing the body during locomotion; the relatively shorter tail could imply lesser agility in the long-nosed caenolestid in comparison to other caenolestids.
This death rate is especially high during the dry season. [5] A major factor that determines survival of young is the mother's age; there are many deaths when the mother is less than 11 months. [6] The average gestation period for the gray four-eyed opossum is 13 to 14 days, and each newborn weighs about 9 grams (0.32 oz). [5]
The largest species, the Virginia opossum (Didelphis virginiana), is the only marsupial to be found in North America, north of Mexico. The Virginia opossum has opposable toes on their two back feet. One of the synapomorphies of this genus is the hypertrophied spinous processes of the cervical vertebrae, which also interlock. As a result, this ...
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]