Easy to tick off Dad with deep-fake opossum

Rambling through central Illinois, spreading the last seeds collected last fall in hopes of some thawing and less freezing.


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         We were driving home after checking traps on a recent frigid day when the middle boy grumbled.
	Our catch that day was one opossum and the boy mentioned something about “all the ticks that opossums eat.”
	I almost crashed the truck. Perhaps you too have heard about the wonders of opossums or have seen a popular meme on social media that praises them for eating up to 5,500 ticks per week. This may have made you change your view of opossums – or even led you to attract them to your property to rid the area of ticks.
	Well, you’ve been had.
	The study that spawned that tick-eating narrative was done by New York researchers in 2009. They live-trapped five opossums and put them in kennels after infesting each of them with 100 larval blacklegged ticks. Ticks were given time to get a bloodmeal, after which they are typically so fat they fall off the host.
	Unlike other animals in the study (chipmunks, squirrels, mice, veeries and catbirds) opossums kept the bottom of their kennels relatively free of ticks. 
	Then the animals were set free, without combing their fur to see if the ticks were still on them. Thus was born the legend of tick-eating possums. 
	But the rest of the story is that Cecilia Hennessy, an assistant professor of biology at Eureka College, also did a scientific study in 2021. Her study included a review of 23 other published papers that examined opossum diet. None found evidence of tick nymphs or adults being eaten.
	Hennessy also studied the gut contents of 32 opossum carcasses collected in central Illinois. While there were ticks on the carcasses, there were none in the stomachs of those same carcasses. None. You think they might eat a few while grooming, but there was no sign of that.
	Now, this is not a reason to dislike opossums, though they are vectors for several tick-borne diseases and are generally disagreeable little marsupials. This is just a cautionary tale about social media, memes and arguing with your father.

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    Parting shot: Does Illinois have a pension problem? Hmm. Consider the following from IllinoisPolicy.org. If the state paid $1 million per day, it would still take 597 years to pay off the current pension deficit. And that doesn’t count any additional pension debt that might accumulate along the way. Overall, the state has a total of $497 billion in pension liabilities and pays $32 million per day just to fund the five state-pension systems for public employees.
   Contact Jeff Lampe at (309) 231-6040 or jeff@wklypost.com.