sasspossrilla

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It's too late. I've already depicted you as seething Santa and me as the stoic opossum

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Possum!!

I've been wanting to draw an opossum for a lil while now but kept messing up. I think this finally looks opossum enough so VOILA!!

He's such a cute lil guy! ^^

I left to take a break and came back to this. He's uhhh started making up weird quotes like, "Live, laugh, toaster bath"? Let's all try to give him as many hugs as we can! :,< I think he needs them. (1 like = 1 hug)

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Dirty possum punk

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“You still don't understand what you're dealing with, do you? The perfect organism. Its structural perfection is matched only by its hostility”

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It has a severe case of brainworms for possums

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It got a ref sheet of its fursona from its friend Gale on bluesky!!

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You have woken up in fundamentally the same world you woke up in yesterday. You know there's some horrible shit coming up, you know it's going to be hard and probably scary, but you are in the same world, and the same solutions exist to the same problems. You can take time to feel shitty, but you have to get out and meet your neighbours, organize your communities, build structures that will keep you and others safe together in the times ahead.

We are the ones we've been waiting for. If you convince yourself it is hopeless you will do nothing and guarantee that failure is inevitable. But if you choose to believe then you can make a difference, you can make the world a better place, together we can fight and together we can win. Start saying it today, even if you don't believe it yet: "I believe that we will win"

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You might've heard that Virginia opossums are North America's only native marsupial, but that's not true. Virginia opossums are the only opossums NORTH OF MEXICO (i.e. in the US and Canada). In reality, there are AT LEAST 21 species of opossum native to North America

Because of this misconception, sometimes people call Virginia opossums "North American opossums," but there are several species that could apply to. So just use the name of the species you mean

A complete list of the 21 species in NA are here. And you can check the Mammal Diversity Database maps of all of these to see they're in NA too

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Oposstober Day 31

Poss-O-Lantern

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Oposstober Day 26

Yapok

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Oposstober Day 25

25 Beans

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Oposstober Day 24

Three Footed Beepum

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gloom&misery

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Oposstober Day 23

Home

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Oposstober Day 22

The Whisker King

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I've been wondering about the tick thing being a myth. Is it just that possums don't eat that many ticks, or do they not eat ticks at all? Do we know how that myth got started?

Good question and the origin of the myth actually started with a scientific paper.

The original study that started the claim that possums eat 5k ticks a season took several animal species from the wild, put tick larvae on them, counted how many they ate, and used those numbers to get an estimate of how many they could theoretically eat in the wild. The results of that paper were widely publicized and quickly spread as a reason to like possums.

However, newer studies, like this one, studied wild possum stomachs and found NO ticks in them at all. They also looked at the literature about possums and ticks and found that possums can carry ticks and that other studies of possum diets don't support them eating many at all. If they do eat ticks from grooming, the amount is a negligible part of their diet and maybe like a couple they eat from grooming themselves. They also found that the original study was highly flawed. The study didn't count how many tick larvae fell off the possums and assumed any that weren't on them were eaten. And that they based the estimates off of 100 tick larvae per species tested. The tick test was also done on possums in captivity, and animals in captivity act differently than those in the wild so they should not have just made the estimate and ran with it.

If you'd like an easier to read version of the newer study, this paper does a good job summarizing it.

Personally, I hate seeing the tick fact being spread around because of the idea that animals need to be useful to humans somehow to be worthy of life. I see stuff online frequently that people learn the debunked tick fact and use that as a reason to like possums. Even people saying that them supposedly eating ticks is reason enough to not outright kill them. But why do they need to be useful to us just to be appreciated? Possums are wonderful creatures and they don't need to eat ticks or whatever to be an important part of the ecosystem and admired for their unique characteristics.

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Oposstober Day 19

Anniversary