Opossums Don't Care About You - Beatrice the Biologist

This is an opossum.

Is he adorable? Yes.
Does he care about your problems? No.

But people in Brooklyn didn’t know this. The city released a gaggle* of opossums into city parks, hoping they would be nature’s solution to the rat problem. The only problem was that no one explained this to the opossums (or not very well). Surrounded by an abundance of food that we call “trash,” the opossums weren’t so interested in eating rats. Now Brooklyn has rat and opossum issues.

*Okay, I don’t really know what a group of opossums is called, but gaggle is fun to say.

Hm… What should they bring to the city to deal with the opossums? Answer: Nothing, because whatever it is will just make the problem worse.

What’s the message here? There happen to be two of them:
1. We don’t know what we’re doing. (I have another post about introducing species this way.)
2. Nature doesn’t care what we want. It just wants to eat garbage. No, that’s just opossums.

Side story: On my trip to Australia, the only marsupial I saw was an opossum, which I could have seen in the U.S. just as easily. Kangaroos? No. Wombats? Not a single one. I fail.