It's Not True

[JoePa]

A study done in 2009 purported to find opossums ate ticks - but more than 20 studies done since that looked at opossums foraging , stomach contents and scat found absolutely no evidence of ticks - they concluded that ticks are not a preferred diet item for opossums - goes to show how things get started and spread on the net -

[Sam Menard]

There is a lot of bogus info floating around. Sometimes people make honest mistakes, and sometimes people purposely post crap either for kicks, to sow division, or to further an agenda. The internet can be a great tool and a destructive tool.

[longpointer]

I vaguely recall that study ; a bunch of different critters were involved but it was a high percentage of opossums that would eat ticks as opposed to the other critters that ate none at all... or something like that. I guess if you are hungry enough you will eat anything ?

[mosquito]

Seems the New York researchers either didn't care or didn't have time to do a thorough testing,.... larval tick to full and gorged and dropping off in 4 days, too lazy to wait till no more ticks were dropping off or just idiots...or both.

https://www.fieldandstream.com/conse...ont-eat-ticks/

In that study, researchers in New York placed six captured species of small mammals and birds (white-footed mice, chipmunks, gray squirrels, opossums, catbirds, and veeries) into cages and then “inoculated” them on their heads and necks with 100 larval ticks. For the next four days—the amount of time deemed sufficient in the study for a tick to gorge and drop off a host—researchers counted the number of ticks that fell from the cages into a collection pan. Any ticks not accounted for directly were assumed to have been consumed or destroyed as the animals groomed themselves.

Squirrels and the half-dozen opossums in the study seemed to rid themselves of the most ticks, allegedly killing 83 to 96.5 percent of the ticks, with the opossums on the higher end of the scale. From these numbers, people extrapolated that opossums can eat up to 5,500 ticks each season, making them an “ecological trap” for ticks and a “net reducer” of the parasites.

The Evidence Against Opossums Eating Ticks

According to Collier, the 2009 study looked at captive opossums, while Hennessy and Hild’s later work focused on wild ones. “[Hennessy and Hild’s] paper reviewed all the science—23 papers in all—on opossum foraging, stomach contents, and scat,” says Collier.

In the 2021 study, Hennessy and Hild used a dissecting microscope to look for ticks or tick body parts in the stomachs of 32 Virginia opossums from central Illinois. They found absolutely no evidence of ticks and concluded that ticks are not a preferred diet item for opossums.