BANGOR DAILY NEWS • March 24, 2022
North America’s only marsupial is not a tick-eating machine gobbling up thousands of the parasites in a single meal. In fact, it turns out ticks are not even part of an opossum regular diet. The myth of a single opossum eating thousands of ticks in a single week dates to a study conducted by the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in 2009. Researchers extrapolated numbers and came to the conclusion that a single opossum in the wild routinely ate between 5,000 and 6,000 ticks a week. But a 2021 peer-reviewed study debunked the opossum tick-eating myth. And a subsequent search of scientific literature on the diets of opossums failed to back up the 2009 study. What’s worse, opossums can carry certain pathogens, including the one that causes Equine protozoal myeloencephalitis (EPM) that affects the central nervous system of horses.