PLENTY Spring 2020 Plenty Spring 2020-WEB | Page 33

Mission
ImPOSSUMble
B y pamela B o e
I
stood frozen in fear, backed
up against the minivan,
clutching the takeout bag
from Poolesville’s Oriental
Gourmet as a shield (which
was dripping General Tso’s sauce
down my leg). For between me
and my little cottage stood what
looked like the world’s biggest
rat, and it was as surprised by me
as I was by it. Swallowing hard, I
squared my shoulders, faced its
beady black eyes glaring from a
ghost white face, and squeaked
out a less-than-confident “SHOO!”
It returned a low, guttural hiss,
and with the speed of an unim-
pressed snail, turned and waddled
back into the woods, its straight,
rat-like tail leaving a trail behind it
in the snow. My pride long gone, I
skittered into the house and con-
sidered two important lessons I’d
just learned: 1) General Tso’s sauce
looks surprisingly like blood, and
2) Opossums are more scared of us
than we are of them.
Of course, at the time, I didn’t
realize I had just had an encoun-
ter with an opossum. Like I said,
I thought I’d just faced off with
the world’s biggest rat. But since
then have learned I had indeed
been lucky enough to meet North
America’s only marsupial, and
nature’s best eco-cleaner! And
now, having learned a few facts
about them, I am one of their big-
gest fans. In fact, if I ran into that
critter again, I would definitely not
send it off into the night. Knowing
what I know now, I would want it
to spend time in our yard!
Why? If you live in the Mont-
gomery County Agricultural
Reserve, or anywhere else in the
Eastern United States for that
matter, you should be familiar with
the ravages of Lyme disease. The
bacteria that cause it is transmit-
ted by deer ticks (aka black-legged
ticks) that bite any warm-blooded
animal they can latch onto.
Dr. Amar Duggirala, Director
of the Poolesville Family Practice,
has been in the trenches of the
local fight against Lyme for over
14 years, treating infected patients
with strong antibiotics. Some
patients get cured, but others
end up with chronic symptoms
(fatigue, muscle aches, difficulty
concentrating) well after initial
treatment. He laments that though
doctors can successfully address
an initial infection, patients can get
re-infected as there is no known
vaccination.
In 2018, nearly 1,000 new cases
of Lyme were reported in Mary-
land alone. And the trend seems
to be holding steady. As long as
the deer tick popula-
tion thrives, so too does
Lyme. Even if deer were
completely eradi-
cated from the area—a
scenario that very few
would wish—it wouldn’t
get rid of the disease
carrying deer tick
population,
because
though they
are named
deer tick, they
latch on almost any warm-blooded
animal. Neither would pesticides
be a viable option to control the
ticks in the Reserve, due to the
need to protect the pollinator
count for the agricultural sector.
If only there was a decent natural
predator for deer ticks that could
help mitigate the spread of Lyme
disease in humans….
Enter the opossum! Every
week, these homely looking fur-
balls munch on thousands of deer
ticks, ridding our yards, fields and
forests of the vermin. These black
and white varmints, as meticu-
lously clean as Felix Unger when it
comes to hygiene, wash their coats
more often than the common
housecat. As opossums waddle
about foraging for food, deer ticks
jump on to them by the droves,
only to be cleaned and eaten—lit-
erally by the thousands. In fact,
it is estimated that they vacuum
up to 5,000 ticks per opossum, per
week! Consequently, the opossum
population is inversely related to
the deer tick population. For that
reason alone, it would serve us
well to protect these small wild
animals!
But they don’t just eat ticks.
Noelia Schmidt, Natural Resources
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