February 9, 2023 • 49 mins
Josh and Chuck take a listener’s suggestion – many, many suggestions – and learn that possums are pretty great and very much misunderstood. By the end of this episode you will too!
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of I
Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh,
and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too, and this is
a episode of Stuff you should Know. I thought you
can say, welcome to the Bossom Cast. I thought about it,
(00:23):
and my brain wouldn't wouldn't form that together. I was like,
there's a there's a pun in here, and I can't
quite grasp it. So that's good. Your your pungen is
being dulled. Yeah, it's funny those pungens. They're bald and
they have like sheet white skin. I'm not even sure
(00:44):
what that means. It means that they look a lot
like Jonathan Strickland. I wondered if that's what you meant. Yeah,
goodness me, man, I haven't heard from him in a
long time. You don't think Strickland tan's up? No, No,
I think Strickland up pours the sun. Okay, just a little,
just a little note between you and me. I got
(01:05):
a question for you. Okay, does this episode on possums
or opossums? They're both correct, It's fine either way, right.
Does this have anything to do with a certain Instagram follower?
It does as a matter of fact, Oh good, we
have an Instagram follower and there they Their handle is
(01:29):
underscore G. I O I underscore G and I clicked
in on it and they have a pronunciation, so I
guess it's d oh yeah, okay. And they have been
posting since April um. They said they I think I
found their first posters on April four and they said, um,
(01:49):
I'm going to post every time you post asking for
a Possum episode until you finally do. And they have
been doing that ever since. I don't think they've missed
a single one. Uh yeah, I mean she's persistent. I'll
say that, yeah for sure. And maybe you get what
you want when you're persistent because we're doing the episode.
(02:09):
I'm just curious what she's gonna be up to after this. Nothing.
They always goes to us after that, they're like, thanks, chumps.
Well here's what I have to say to you, stranger
but friend on Instagram. Uh, don't just come at us
with some new topic and badgers about that one, especially
not badgers, especially not badgers. You're getting your possums to
(02:34):
just settle down and enjoy it. You got what you wanted. Yeah,
I have to say not just persistent too, but um
they were. Also they got kind of funny because after
a while he just got sick of saying, like, possum
episode please. So for the Nintendo episode, they said that
any yes, is the only system we had as kids.
(02:54):
Otherwise we played outside with possums. No. No No, she's gotten
very creative with how she were in the possum thing,
and I think that's that was part of the charm
of it. Otherwise it would have just ignored it out
of some weird game. Yeah for sure, Yeah, absolutely for sure.
So yes, that is that is the impetus for this
possum episode. But I'm glad that they they suggested it
(03:15):
because I was fine with possums before. But I learned
a lot about possums oral possums researching this episode. And
I gotta tell you, I'm I'm a friend of the possum.
Now I am too. At some point you'll hear a
first person possum story from me. I just don't know
when I'm gonna work it in. That's what in the
(03:37):
BIS they call it a teaser. Uh. And if you
want to just stop before you even listen any further,
if you're near somewhere where you can watch a YouTube video.
Just look up Butter bu t t e r at
the Possum pet on YouTube and just go ahead and
tell me after that that you think possums are like us,
(04:00):
are scarier, weird FTC Butter uh work Butter's charms. Okay,
I'll go look. I'll go look up Butter later on.
But you can imagine is a pet possum who was rescued, rehabbed,
I think, with the idea of going back into the wild.
But as we'll see, that doesn't always take because sometimes
that possum just wants to go back inside and snuggle. Yeah,
(04:22):
it sounds like Butter's rehab or checked all the right boxes. Yeah,
it's a very cute video. So one of the things
that I learned about possums is that I've got um,
not only my friend of the possum, I've got possum pride. Now,
possom fever that a little bit of that too, but
more more pride than anything, because Chuck there there's a
(04:43):
there's one specific possum, the Virginia possum, that is native
to the United States, traditionally the southern southeastern United States um,
and that Virginia possum is the only marsupial native to
the United States, and our friends listen in Australia are like, crikey,
We've got a million of those here. We'll get this Australia,
(05:05):
your marsupials seem to have come according to the fossil
record from the America's which means that our possum friends
are actually the predecessors of your marsupials, which means chuck.
That means that the wombats, the dumbats, the dun Arts,
(05:26):
the kangaroos, kalas, and the qualls, the bilbies in the bandicoots,
Tasmanian devil, Pasmanian tiger, not to mention the wallabies, they
all descend from a North American or South American possum,
because that's where all marsupials came from. You forgot about
fairy toasts, yeah, which apparently you don't toast. Yeah, big correction, Sorry, Australia,
(05:51):
you don't toast very bread. I registered an angry email
to the editor of the blog that I got that
idea from. By the way, Oh that was from you.
What the fairy fairy toast? Yeah? Yeah, you didn't mention it.
Did you know I thought that I thought that was
submitted by Libya. Okay, I know I found that one.
(06:13):
I'm throwing myself under the bus. All right, well I'm
driving that bus, buddy, so I'm gonna hit the brakes
and I'm not gonna I'm gonna back up so you
don't get hit. Oh I got that's an inside. Uh So,
your little spiel on possums pointed out a couple of
(06:33):
things that I want to point out. One is that
possums are not rodents. Yeah. I think a lot of
Americans probably think they're kind of in the rat family
or something because they look sort of rat like, But
they're not. Like you said, they're more soupials. And the
other thing is, well, that's it, they're more soup heals.
So they have little pouches just like a kangaroo friends,
(06:56):
and they keep a little there called Joey's to their
little babies or Joey's. Yeah, a baby apossum is called
a Joey and cute. Like. I knew what marsupials were,
but what I didn't realize is that it was, as
far as I can tell, one of two categories that
mammals can land in depending on how they they're young,
justest date and a marsupial is just a type of
(07:17):
animal that, evolutionarily speaking, really emphasizes the lactation phase of
development of young, whereas us and just about every other
mammal um we're called placentals. We just date our young
in the womb for much longer. Um possums, it's a
very short time, and then they're in the pouch lactating
(07:39):
for a really long time. Yeah. I was surprised to
see that when they were born there very very tiny,
like on the order of just an inch or so. Yeah,
I saw a honey bee size in one place. That's
a little possible. And then they're in that pouch like
sometimes up to like seventy days. Yeah, getting mother's milk
(07:59):
from mom the possum. Yeah. So we'll get to that.
We'll get to that, don't don't. Let's not get ahead
of ourselves. I know, I'm excited to chuck. But um,
back to the fossil record. So uh, it turns out
that the the ancestor of all marsupials seems to have
emerged in North America, maybe South America at the very least,
if they emerged in North America. They traveled down to
(08:21):
South America and then Antarctica and then Australia back when
all that stuff was connected. And I mean they're really
really old. Um. I saw a hundred and forty million
years old um. And then the immediate ancestors of possums,
which look very similar to today's possums. They have not
changed very much, um since about the time the dinosaurs
(08:42):
went away sixty five million years ago, right, and since
then we've had possums of various types running around Earth.
But at one point they died off in North America.
Luckily they were a bunch left in South America. And
when the Sthmuths of Panama rose again from the sea
like poseidon um, like the October. Yeah, just as good,
(09:07):
maybe even better chuck uh, they were able to travel
back up to North America. And about a million years ago,
our friend the Virginia possum evolved and basically said, I
really like the Southeast and I'm gonna stay here for
the next million years. That's right, And you know what
I've forgot. The other thing I was gonna say after
your spiel was that you Aussie's out there, you do
(09:29):
have something called a possum. Oh yeah, it's not what
we have as a possum. It's a it's a different
animal altogether. So there is a little bit of confusion there.
So if you're if you're buttering up your fairy toast
right now and you're really upset, you're like, I've got
possums on a lot of these trees. You probably do,
but they're not. They're not, and I looked them up.
They're very cute too, but they're not like our possums.
(09:50):
They are the ones that I saw are called bush
tail possums, and they are super cute. But that's a
big difference are possums. The Virginia possum spends most of
its time on the ground, climbs trees, maybe to find food,
maybe to escape a predator. The bush tail possums basically
live in trees. They live high up. But they're both marsupials.
But there's actually we can pinpoint the jackass that actually
(10:13):
created this confusion back in the seventeen fifties. His name
was Joseph Banks, right, that's right, um, sorry, the seventeen seventies.
Seventeen seventies, what did you say in seventeen fifties. I
think I should have said the seventeen fifties, give or
take a couple of decades. Banks was a brit He
was a naturalist, and he went to Australia with James
(10:35):
Cook and in seventeen seventy founder Marsupial and basically said
it was the same thing that we had in North
America and it really wasn't at all. And uh, you
know that that's where that all came from. Yeah, so
there's there's your confusion. I guess technically Australia that means
that our possums are the real possums. I'm not trying
(10:57):
to start a flame war here, I'm just saying that
seems to be the case. Yeah, And and since we're there,
we might as well cover the opossum thing out of
the gate and then we can really get down to business,
because they're all correct. Opossum is just fine. Uh. In fact,
that that's the original wording that came from an Algonquin
word um A p o s o u m a
(11:20):
palsum I guess, which means white beast or white dog.
And you know you can use either one. You can
say o possum you can say possum. You can spell
it opossum, you can spell it possom. Yeah. And apparently
in Europe, uh, in the Enlightenment period, the eighteenth century,
they were nuts for these things. Uh, and they they
(11:42):
I guess somebody gave them one to the Royal Society
in London. Sorry, this is back in the mid seventeenth century,
so the sixteen hundreds. And they looked at it and
they're like, this thing is a pouch. It's weird looking.
I declare that it's probably a cross between a fox
and an ape, some sort of hybrid. That turned out
not to be the cases. We'll see. Like you said,
possums are their own thing. So let's talk about where
(12:06):
you find them here in the United States, because we
should say from this basically, from this point on, we're
gonna we're gonna be talking about the Virginia possum, the
American United States possums, right, that's right. Uh. You can
tell by their little flashy red, white and blue jumpsuit
that they wear. It's very cute. So you mentioned the southeast,
(12:27):
and that is very much true. Uh, that is where
they were really hanging out for a long time. But
starting in about I guess, let should say at least
the nineteenth century, they started moving on along elsewhere in
the country, and they kind of spread around. They were
I think they saw him in the mid eighteen hundreds
in New York and then other parts of New England
and then the Midwest, and basically, as like farms and
(12:50):
cities and urban population started springing up, possums kind of
followed suit. Because possums, as we'll find out, and you know,
every animals really food motivated, but it seems that possums
are really really food motivated. So then there were things,
you know, a lot more things to eat in a
lot more places. So possums started traveling around naturally, and
apparently people even took them and dropped them off in
(13:13):
other parts of the country, including Washington State. So I'm
not really positive, but it seems like you might find
a possum almost anywhere in the United States. Now. It's weird.
I saw a map of their distribution and if you
go up from North Texas and then spread out toward
(13:35):
Idaho to the left, and then up towards like maybe Ohio,
Illinois to the right, it almost make like a cartoon
tornado shape coming out of Texas. They're not there. You're
not going to find them there, really weird, but you
will find them surrounding the northwest California, Texas, Mexico, and
(13:55):
then all down the southeastern United States and now up
the eastern side of the Midwest and all along the
Eastern seaboard up to Ontario, the lower Upper Peninsula of Michigan.
Talk about a mind blower, that is. Yeah, I think
they they got their passports in order and wandered into Canada. Yeah.
So these people are so friendly, Yeah, and they talk
(14:18):
kind of funny and they're very charming. Yeah, that's what
you just nailed, Canada and leftover poutine in the back alley.
There's nothing to turn your little pink nose up at. No,
and food definitely did help them. They're they're like, I
like these humans. They're pretty great, and I'm glad they
came along because, yes, they're a huge constant food source um,
but we're also a source of shelter too, because um
(14:41):
possums have a very bare, naked tail that is really
off putting to a lot of people, and understandably so,
their ears are also naked, and when you put those together,
they can get things like frost bite. Um, they can
not survive the cold all that well. They do develop
a winter coat, but they're just they like it warm
for the most part. But as humans have moved further
(15:03):
and further north and um, the possums have followed us
because we have barnes addicts call spaces uh wall voids
like just places for possums to to live in the
colder months. So that's another reason why they their range
has expanded to Yeah, and the old Virginia possum. Uh,
you've seen them around there, about the size of a cat,
(15:25):
like a house cat, way anywhere from four to eleven pounds, uh,
eleven pound possum. That's that's pretty decent sized possum. I
thought up to fourteen my friend. Oh, I'm sure that.
I'm sure the tubbier varieties can can pack it in
for sure. That will make your forearms burned carrying that
around uh two to three ft long, and that's with
the tail. And generally the Virginia possum you would describe
(15:48):
as sort of whitish gray. Their faces are a little
more white, their bodies are kind of gray. But sometimes
they'll have little spooches and splotches and bands and things
like that. Um, all right, so I think that's a
good teaser. And then atomically speaking, and Adam, what's the word?
I think you had it? And anatomically is that right? Yeah?
(16:10):
It doesn't sound right though, does it? No? It sounded weird. Um.
But let's take a break and we'll sort that out
and then we'll come back and talk about possum penis
right after this. All right, you just bring it on out, please, Well,
(16:51):
a possum has a forked penis. And if you can
look up a picture and it, um, well, I guess
it looks like what do you think it looks like?
I am not a sick Oh? So I didn't look
it up. Oh you didn't mean you're sick. Oh, I know,
I'm teasing. I didn't look it up. I I know
kind of what it must look like because from the
(17:13):
description Livia put of both the forked penis and the
multiple vagina, is that female possums have. I got the
gist of it. Yeah, well you just there there it
is right there. I buried the lead. Um. Although we
should say that colonial Americans once again proved, uh, they
had some ingenuity going. But sometimes it could be quite
dumb because they saw this forked penis and they said, oh,
(17:37):
well that is because they impregnate the female through their nostrils.
What else could it be. We know this because we
saw the female possums sticking their nose into their pouches
and they're giving birth and sneezing out their little Joey's
that way right. No, no, I'm saying you got that right,
(17:58):
You got it super super wrong out. Sure, but no,
it's because they so yeah, if you look up there,
it looks a lot like a nematode, a worm of
some sort with a club a club foot basically, yeah,
so um, but yes, the reason it's forked is because
the females have two vaginas that can um, that can
(18:19):
be fertilized by sperm, or that can move sperm to
their ova. Yeah I think I got it right. Um,
and they have a third one for actually giving birth.
So that's why the penis is forked. Because they're just like,
you know, double your pleasure, doubles, you're fun. They look
like little pincers actually, like I guess I'm not seeing
(18:40):
a close up. All the ones I'm seeing are like
they're like, get a load of this. It's really long.
Oh really okay, let me just type in possum penis
close up. I'm just gonna go for it. Where are
you typing in? Beforeis right? Oh? I had the Google
filter on. I see. Yeah, there's one very clear picture.
(19:01):
It looks like a little look like little pincers from
an insect or something safe searches on. Look at you.
I'm just kidding, what the heck was That's not at
all what I just saw. Well, all right, oh no,
that's a baby possum being born. It's like, what is that?
(19:23):
Regardless as a penis? Okay, it's got a forked penis.
Let's talk about their teeny tiny brains, because they do.
And Livia even put that the wording teeny tiny brains
one of the smallest brain to body ratios and mammaled them.
Uh and it's kind of cute. Olivia also included a
little brief thing of like, how do you find out
how big a brain is in little mammals? Well, you
(19:46):
take their skulls. If you're scientists, and you put dried
beans in there, and then you I would say, you
would probably guess the beans is an office, like you know, uh,
white elephant gift kind of thing. But then they obviously
can out the beans and that's how they tell It
makes very good sense, but it seems kind of cute
and rudimentary. It does, but I mean it does reveal
(20:08):
something really um surprising about the possums. They have a
really small brain to body ratio compared to other animals
their size. Like the possums brain case held beans, just
little beans, not that many. What kind of bean ownder
I'm gonna say lentils now, now that's really small. Would
like the usually the fun version is jelly beans. Sure,
(20:31):
that's kind of big, though, maybe a black eyed pea
or something. Okay, we'll go with black eyed piece, dried
black eyed piece. They hold twenty five of those. Cats
held a hundred and twenty five, Raccoons held a hundred
and fifty. And that actually seems to support this longstanding
notion that possums are actually kind of dumb. Not true.
They're not really dumb at all, and in fact, there's
(20:52):
plenty of tests that they've shown their actually surprisingly intelligent.
They beat out rats, rabbits, dogs, cats on um remembering
where to find food, and then the maze the old
standby for proving intelligence in an animal. They actually can
beat rats and cats in learning mazes, that's right. And
(21:12):
UH also can remember if they've had something that made
them sick to eat that they even just tasted like
a year later. So again, I think this food thing
is really important because it seems like they score really
well when there's food involved. Uh. Like you mentioned, they're
found in a lot of places in the United States.
(21:32):
They really love a dense forest, but you'll see them
in cities all over the place. They eat everything basically. Um,
they eat little mammals, eat worms, eat insects, eat birds
and reptiles, eat seeds and fruits, and obviously garbage there
you know, like the raccoon. They will you will find
(21:52):
them in a garbage can, just go into town on
like a pizza box or something. Yeah, but I saw
Chuck that they're often unfair really blamed for knocking over
garbage cans because they're the ones who come along after
the thing that knocked it over, a raccoon or a
dog or something, and they're just scavenging. But they get
to blame because they're the one that gets caught. Not fair,
(22:13):
just another miscarriage of justice exactly. What about when you
see one walk around the day, that means they're rabbit? Right, No, again,
another misconceptions there. If if they're walking around the day,
it means that they eating is so good that they've
abandoned their nocturnal ways and are just doing the human
(22:35):
thing and eating whenever they want. They don't have to
wait until nighttime to look for food. They can find
at anytime. So no, if you see a possum, it
does not mean it's rabbit. And as a matter of fact,
possums tend to actually be um cleaner than other animals,
both disease wise and with fastidiousness. There there as fastidious
as cats and cleaning themselves, and they actually clean themselves
(22:57):
in similar ways, licking their paw and we're up in
their face with the back of their paw. It is
super cute. And while they do that chuck, they stand
up on their hind quarters and balance themselves with their
cute little weird tail. They also have mouths that are
cleaner than other animals like cats, and because they have
a really low body temperature, they're very unlikely to catch rabies,
(23:20):
which means they're also very unlikely to transfer rabies to you.
So if you're ever bitten by a possum, which is
a very unusual thing. Indeed, as we'll see you are,
probably you can just go start reading the newspaper. We
don't even have to go to the hospital or anything.
Just sit down and get back to your coffee, right,
Like it's what drinking coffee reading a newspaper. Don't you
(23:42):
know that gen Z is really into throwback stuff, are they?
Are they reading newspapers now? If they're not now, I
predict they will be in six months and then in
seventeen months they'll be done with newspapers. Uh. Possums are
also great to have around, um, your neighborhood or your farm. Uh.
They will eat and this is astounding. Uh, they love
(24:04):
ticks and they will eat five thousand ticks in a
single like three or four month period over a season. Man,
talk about possum pride chuck. Oh huge, And you know
that's a very big deal for people like me that's
been a lot of time in the woods and tickboard
and disease is such a big thing, you know in
the South. Uh, Like I said, if you had a farm,
they're gonna eat um critters and vermin that are gonna
(24:26):
be making your crops not so great. And the eating slugs,
they're gonna be eating beetles. Uh, they're gonna you know,
that rotten fruit in that apple tree that you don't
care for, They're gonna love that tree because they're gonna
eat everything that's drop on on the ground. And if
they're mice and rats around, they'll probably chase them off
or eat them and or eat them. Yeah, because they
will eat basically anything like even actual garbage. Like you said, um,
(24:51):
they'll also eat carrion, which makes them a really unusual
animal because there's not many animals out there that actually
are carrion eaters. But if they come along road kill,
they'll eat the road kill. And in fact, they've been
known to eat entire rabbits uh that they find as
road killed. Because they have such a need for calcium,
(25:11):
they will, um, they will eat the entire skeleton because
they have to. They got to get that calcium big time.
But because of this, because they're so good at cleaning
up an environment, an ecosystem that they come along to,
their um sometimes called nature sanitary engineer. See no one,
no one ever says that. No, well, we're saying that
now I love it. Possum pride. We should get we
(25:34):
should get shirts. I think we should too. Uh. As
far as they're bedding down and stuff like that, they
are not ones that are typically gonna build their own den. Uh.
They're more like um rehabbers. They will go into someone
else's abandoned in and they'll fix it up a little bit.
They'll bring their own grass and twigs and leaves and
(25:56):
kind of line it and uh and cover up any
drafty areas if they want to stay warmer. But they're
not gonna stick around for too long. They just hold
up on these dens for a few days. They're probably
resting there during the day. They have found that, um
a little mamas. Maybe there for a few weeks at
a time, if they found a really good hidy hole
(26:18):
because they've got a lot going on with their little
Joey's in there, or if it's in the wintertime or something.
But they do they do travel. They will get around
in a surprising fashion, right. Yeah. They Some guy tagged
them with alright guess r f I D trackers and
found that, um, some of them will move up to
(26:40):
fifteen miles in a few weeks. Maybe that's that's a
long way with those little legs. Yeah. Um. And that's
actually an argument against keeping possums as pets is that
you're probably not going to be able to get them
the exercise that they would get in the wild. They
move around a lot. Yeah, just stffif. Or another way
(27:02):
to put it is, if you have a postum pet,
you need to take them out for a walk quite frequently.
Oh man, I'd love to see that. Um. You mentioned
how they'll like line the dens or burrows that they
borrow from other animals with like twigs and leaves and
stuff like that. The way that they collect that stuff
is they have um opposable like thumbs basically on their
(27:25):
front and back feet, and so they'll gather like leaves
with their front their front hands basically is what they're called.
They'll push them under themselves to their back feet there
with their feet, they'll kind of bunch them up, and
then they pick it up with their tail and they'll
carry it off to the den in their tail, like
the old person with the bundle of sticks on the
(27:46):
cover of led Zeppelin front, but with the tail instead. Yeah,
the old guy with the tinder bunch on his back. Yeah, Uh.
They and you know, speaking of tails, you've kind of
dropped a little tail tidbits here and there. Uh, they
can hang from those tails. It's not something you're gonna
see a lot. And I get the impression just from
looking at pictures that younger possums hang from their tail
(28:09):
a little bit more than full grown ones. It's probably
because it's it's taxing once you're like a you know,
eleven pound possum to hang from your tail. But they
will do it every now and then. If you look
up pictures of hanging possums, they'll they'll use that tail
to wrap around a branch every now and then. Yeah,
they're they're they're I think the only animal in North
America with the prehensible tails, right, which means they can
(28:32):
use the tail as an like a fifth hand. Yeah. Um.
The other thing about that, though, is the idea that
they sleep upside down hanging from their tails. That seems
to be cartoon myth. Essentially, they don't do that. They
sleep in their burrows. Yeah, they're not, like, they're not bats. No,
do you want to talk about um little baby possums now? Yeah,
(28:57):
they're super cute. Um. I guess the sad part that
we should go ahead and say is that apossums life
is pretty short. It's about two years in the wild, um,
maybe three or four if they're living in someone's house. Yeah.
You hear two years and you're like, well, yeah, all
those cars are skewing it downward for sure. But no,
if they're in captivity and it's just another year or
(29:18):
two more, they they're just not destined to live very long. Yeah,
I'm sure the cars don't help, though, No, for sure.
I've never ran over a possum. Thankfully. That's great. I
think you should have a key chain that says that.
But you know what I did do one time. I
think it's a good time for my story. Okay, you
know what, let's save the story for the next break.
(29:38):
Oh my god. Uh. As far as their litters, this
is another thing that's a little you know. I guess
it's sort of why they've been around for you know, however,
many tens of millions of years. But it is a
little sad. They will have um way more babies, generally
than they have ability to feed them. The mom has
(30:01):
a maximum of thirteen nipples, sometimes not even that any,
and sometimes they will have up to five little half
inch babies, uh, anywhere from four to twenty five. But
you know that means in some of these litters, half
of them literally just won't have literally won't have food
for mama, and they're just you know, they're basically abandoned. Yeah,
(30:25):
the mom's like natural selection sucks. Kids are no but
we but we survive over the long term. So um,
the like we said, the little baby possums are about
the size of a honeybee. When they're born, they just
state in the womb. For Olivia says twelve the thirteen
days I saw twenty eight days, um, and then after
(30:47):
that they're born, but they're kind of just partially born.
They emerged from the womb wearing something called the paraderm,
which is essentially like a um a placenta that they
can that's wrapped around them. It's like as snuggy, but
a placenta version of it. And the only openings they
have to them in the world are holes for their nostrils,
(31:08):
because they use their sense of smell throughout their lives.
But even like the first thing they do is use
their sense of smell and then their mouth, which they
used to latch onto the nipple, and when they come
out of the birth canal, they climb up to that pouch,
climb in and latch onto a nipple. And the reason
that they know to climb upward is because they have
a sense of smell, so they know where to go
(31:30):
based on the sense of smell. They also know to
climb upward because the other sense that they're born with
is a sense of gravity, so they know what's down
and what's up. And with those two things, they can
emerge blind and deaf with only a sense of smell
in a mouth um to to climb up and basically
survive if they can find a nipple latch onto man.
Birth order really matters in a situation like this. Really
(31:53):
you here, I am, Let's party. Uh. As far as
the kind of sounds they make, they um are are
pretty quiet generally, like, it's not like they walk around
howling or making weird noises. Uh. The mom will use
sort of a clicky sound um either during mating season
(32:15):
or to call their little babies back to the pouch
um and they can make a sort of hissing uh.
Livy describes as a growl too, But in my experience,
tease again, it's more of a hiss when a possum
feels cornered. Okay, yeah, that's all I've ever seen is
(32:35):
a like when a possum is angry, it's hissing. That's it, right,
or potentially playing possum. And that is a thing. It's
not a choice that they make. It's almost like a
fainting goat kind of situation. It is an involuntary response
if they have an extreme fear situation, and this is
after they've tried everything else. Uh, they will they will
(32:56):
go limp like a little fainting goat. They will fall down,
They poop themselves or pee themselves. They may stick their
tongue out and drool. Uh. And it all sounds kind
of funny, but it's kind of sad because they can't
do anything about it. And when they're like this, another
animal could just be ravaging them and they will still
be in that state. The thing is is that the
(33:17):
animals probably not doing that because when they just fall
over and seem dead, all of the triggers that that
create predation behavior in um, that animal that had them
cornered just suddenly turn off. And the animals like, what
was I doing? Oh yeah, I was chasing this ball
and that's it. You know. The possums left alone typically,
(33:37):
so it actually works really well, but that's like the
last last resort. The possums also really good at bluffing,
showing its teeth. They have fifty teeth and can bear
their teeth hiss like you said, um, they can growl um.
They can seem kind of intimidating, but the thing is
it's it's all bluffing, like they do not want to
(33:58):
fight your cat or your dog or you. And if
you have a possum that is sitting there hissing at
you or your dog or your cat, you're actually being
really cruel to it. They just want to be left alone,
and they're in an extremely stressful situation that they know
they can't really win. They're not good at fighting, um,
so they basically do what they can to appear sick,
(34:18):
like they'll drool, they'll release it really nasty fluid, and
then hope that you'll just leave them alone. And you
should leave them alone. But also when you're leaving alone,
realize like that that possum wasn't going to do anything.
It's it's just all talk basically, and that makes it
even cuter in my mind. I agree. I think it's
a great time for a second break in a perfect
(34:39):
setup for my story. Okay, we're back, and here is
(35:11):
my story. Uh, senior year in high school, going back
to my very first girlfriend's house. Mallory. Hi, Mallory, she
just ran for congress in Georgia. That sounds so made up, chuck, No,
she did. She lost. I had a girlfriend, you and nurse.
She's from Canada and she ran for congress. Uh. But
(35:32):
she was my very first girlfriend. We were going back
to her house after a date, walked her up onto
the front porch, uh, like I traditionally would do for
a little good lip smack and probably and we kind
of were laughing like we were always doing, and ran
up on the front, very small front porch, probably one
of those like a little, you know, five by five
front porches. And there was a possum on this porch
(35:56):
trapped and immediately turned around and started it was like
something out of a movie. Immediately turned around and started
hissing at us. Mallory starts screaming, I I'm not sure
what I did. I kind of froze. I think, like,
what am I supposed to do here? And Uh. This
possum immediately then tried to squeeze under the um the
(36:17):
railing to you know, get off the porch, and was
so tubby he got his little body stuck. And this
little possum was kind of stuck in hissing and wriggling,
Mallory screaming. I'm I was probably thinking, well, I'm definitely
not getting any lips smacking, thank you, bosom, and that
this problem that was my bossom story. Eventually wriggled his
(36:38):
way free and ran off. Okay, I had a good
laugh about it, but and no one was hurt. But
I had a very very very close encounter. We're talking,
you know, inches defeat. Uh, And it was funny. It's
a very fun memory for me. I wonder if that
possum remembered it later on too. I was just laughing
and shaking his head like I gotta lose some weight.
I wonder if that possum tells that story on it's podcast.
(37:01):
Does uh does Mallory remember that story? Oh, I'm sure
she does. I didn't. Uh, we're not very much in touch,
but I did see her a couple of years ago
at my nephew's wedding and We had a great time
catching up and and her meeting Emily and me meeting
her family. But we did not talk about the possum. Okay,
I bet you anything, she would remember. I think that
(37:22):
was a missed opportunity, Chuck, to talk about the possum. Yeah,
I probably should have mentioned it. So that's a great
possum story. The only possum story I have um is
I remember finding one in the wood pile outside of
our house in Ohio and my dad grabbing it by
its tail and carrying it over like to the woods
to release it. And that thing was trying to curl
(37:45):
up like toward my dad's arm. And at the time,
I was like, God, that possum would kill my dad
if I had the chance. And now I realized that
possum wasn't wasn't doing anything. He was just really mad
and really scared. Yeah, and they had those big fangs
we should mention. So it's it's a little intimidating when
one is when you're seventeen and one is hissing at
you on the front porch. But you know, your dad
(38:07):
was country strong. I guess he would I never thought
about that, but yeah, he is kind of country strong. Uh,
we mentioned having them as pets. Um, it's not a
great idea. They're not great pets because they don't let
you know when they're sick. You're probably not gonna have
a diet that's quite right for him. They're probably gonna
be undernourished under exercise. They're just not an animal that
(38:29):
you should keep in the house. Um. Some states say
you're not allowed to, others say you can if you
have a permit. But like you mentioned earlier, there are
rescue people who rehab them because you know, if mommy
gets hit by car or dies by any other way,
the babies are out there a lot of times and
their aim is to rehab them and send them back
(38:49):
into the wild. But sometimes it doesn't take and they
end up cute pets on YouTube. Man, that was a mouthful,
but you got it right though. Yeah. So, Um, there's
another way that people can interact with possums, and that
is by eating them. Apparently the indigenous tribes of North America,
and I'm guessing South America too, because there's plenty of
(39:10):
possum down there as well, but different species. Um, they
ate them. And this got passed along very quickly to
the earliest colonists to the America's who said it tastes
like pig. Basically, yeah, that seems to be like there
are several quotes here from Libya that where everyone roundly
(39:31):
agrees that they taste like pig. So I'll take their
word for it. I will too, But I'm like, okay,
I can totally understand why you would eat a postum.
Then all you have to do is here one time,
that thing over there tastes like pig, and people are
gonna eat it because you know, everybody likes the taste
of pig. But if you feel guilty about eating pig,
you've got the possum alternative out there for you. I
(39:53):
guess so. Uh. And the way it worked a lot
of times is they would want to catch the possum
alive rather than kill it, so they could bring the
possum home, and for a couple of reasons, they could
either save it for Sunday dinner because it's a little
more special of a meal maybe, And the other important
reason is, you know, you want to make sure that
possums not carrying again, they're not big disease carriers. But
(40:15):
they may not have known this back then. So this
sort of wisdom at the time was to uh, wait
a few days, feed it something good, maybe fatten it
up a little bit, huh, and make sure it's not sick,
and then kill it and need it. Yeah. And I
think in addition to making sure it was not sick,
just not knowing what eight but knowing that a possibly anything.
(40:35):
And if it hasn't passed that stuff yet, then you're
kind of eating it and you might be like, guh,
dead vulture. What it's a dead vulture? A possum does.
So the other thing that you could do, too, is
if you have it alive, you can wait until Sunday dinner,
which was a big thing and the joy of cooking.
Chuck had a recommendation um that if you feed a
(40:58):
trap possum, or if you trap a possum alive, feed
it milk and cereals for ten days. I guess, I
guess like maybe cookie crunch or something. Yeah, no, cookie crisp,
That's what it was. Honey nut cheerios, you name it.
M hm. Um, have you had the multi grain cheerios?
They're really good? Yeah, Rubyat says they're good. They're good. Um,
(41:20):
And then uh, for ten days you feed them milk
and cereal and then you can have them for dinner.
And then there's one other thing about it too. It
was apparently a traditional Thanksgiving food in a lot of
Southern places, right yeah, and Thanksgiving you they're gonna beating
all kinds of acorns and chestnuts and things like that
back when mast we had the American chestnut. Here's that
(41:42):
word again, mast uh. And I think that would fatten
them up and improve their flavor as well. So then
you got this naturally fatten possum for Thanksgiving, uh, where
you might make something called possuminator, which is a very
very popular dish, would was like red pepper or possum
baked with some sweet taters. Yeah. And the other thing
(42:06):
is you didn't need a gun. You wouldn't typically go
out and shoot a possum, which made it a very
like low barrier to entry for hunting mammals. You would
just like tree the possum and then basically shake the
tree and get that possum to fall out. And at
that point, the possum may even be playing dead, so
it's pretty easy taking I think exactly um, which is
(42:29):
so sad. I mean, that's they're easy to hunt because
they're kind of docile. You know. Tell that to Jimmy Carter. Yeah,
Jimmy Carter had a lot of them. Apparently said that
his family got through the depression by eating lots of possum.
And he's far from the only president that's possum adjacent um.
Apparently Washington sent some to an Irish member of Parliament,
(42:52):
Sir Edward Newen new In him in Jefferson like to
give them out to the French when he was the
Minister to France. And then uh Taft, William Howard Taft
was famously served one by the Atlanta Chamber of Commerce
in nine Yeah, and this one led to a you know,
(43:13):
because of uh, we should do it either a long
one on Theodore Roosevelt or a short one on the
Teddy Bear, or maybe a long one on the Teddy Bear.
But you know, the Teddy Bear came along thanks to
Theodore Roosevelt. And there was a cartoonist, Louis c. Greg
who had this idea, Well, now we have William Taft,
so what about Billy possum instead of Teddy Bear? And
(43:35):
even gave this Billy possum stuffed toy tow Uh Taft,
and I think Taft said, oh, this is great, but
it seemed like, you know, it just didn't fly. They
tried to get it to take off, and it just
didn't take off. Billy possum never took off. But we
have a great tidbit to end on that. I think
maybe the fact of the show what which is that
(43:57):
possums are highly highly resistant to not only just snake
bite but venom period. Right, that's absolutely true, man, And
apparently they found this out by accident. They were observing
possums in the wild and someone get bit by like
a rattlesnake, maybe in the Everglades, and they're like, man,
this possums toast and just looked, yeah, it's kind of
(44:22):
brushed his shoulders off and shrugged and walked away. And
the researchers were like, what is that. So they captured
possums and started exposing them to snake bites, which is
really mean. Those possums were like, what are you guys doing?
This is nothing. So they're like, okay, fine, possum, we're
gonna start injecting you intravenously with massive amounts of snake
(44:44):
venom and nothing like the most they could get out
of the possums was something that would look like a
like a human that wasn't allergic to a bee got
a beasting. Yeah, and and we're talking like cobras and
asps or an ugnc s. But vipers, yeah, pit vipers,
pit vipe or as rattlesnakes. Like it wasn't like, uh,
you know, the more severe venom had a worse effect.
(45:07):
The possum was still just like, have you not got
it by now? The venom doesn't bother us, exactly, stop
biting me and giving me shots. So they started looking
into the possums um mechanism for not getting sick or
dying from venom. And they have a special protein they
may be the only animal that has it that encapsulates
(45:29):
and deactivates the venom when it enters their bloodstream crazy
and just does nothing. And they're actually like this possum
protein might actually save lives and then weirdly, in a
weird twist, it also protects them against botuli is um too.
And to put a cherry on top of all of this,
they have synthesized what's called as lt n F lethal
(45:52):
toxin neutralizing factor. It's protein they've been able to synthesize
it now and they don't even need any more possum.
They can just keep resynthesizing it. And they're thinking like, hey,
this may be a literal like cure for snake bite, right, yeah,
Like how far away are they from just calling it
(46:13):
and saying, all right, guys, we got it days day
really okay, days at the very least pit vipers and
those are the ones you gotta worry about, you know.
So yeah, way to go, possums, possum pride? Am I right,
possum pride? You got anything else? I got nothing else? Well?
Big shout out as an f y I to Jerry's
daughter and Nez, who Jerry tells us loves possums, which
(46:38):
means that and as is ahead of the curve because
she loves possums before we did, So big ups in
s I love it, Yeah for sure. And since I
said big ups, and as it's time for a listener mail,
I'm gonna call this more defense of me and Gordon Lightfoot.
You just can't let this go, can you? Hey? I
(47:00):
keep getting emails. I've let it go. I think I
know the one you're talking about, and I agree with this.
This person if they're if it's the one I'm thinking of, Yeah,
it's for Mimi, And Mimi says this, Hey, guys, just
listen to the listener mail on toast and I feel
like I should apologize as a Canadian for the Canadians accusing,
accusing Chuck of young yuncking for not liking Gordon Lightfoot.
(47:20):
This is the one it, Mimi says. By the way,
I don't even know Gordon Lightfoot. Because I'm a millennial.
People are allowed to have opinions and not like things,
especially when the thing is so subjective, like different taste
in music and movies. I thought yum yucking was criticizing
or judging people negatively because of what they like. Yes,
I think in this way, Chuck is actually being yum
(47:42):
yucked by other people for the music he doesn't like.
It's all very meta. Uh And, on a personal note,
please come back to Vancouver. I've seen you when he
came in twenty seventeen. Uh Ford pinto no idea what
that was before your show? Even, Mimi, where do you live? Well,
apparently near Vancouver. Uh And is younger, so you know
(48:05):
that explains a lot. Anyway, I had tickets to your
March show before it was canceled. Oh, we had to
cancel Vancouver. Yeah, we just did San Francisco maybe or
we did one before. I can't remember. I think we
only did two shows and and yeah, Vancouver got canceled.
Well we out with the Vancouver to come back then.
I didn't remember that that was on the canceled list.
(48:28):
So uh, sorry about that, Mimi, But thank you for
getting my back. And here's a deal. If when we
come back to Vancouver, just reply to that email thread
that we had going and say guest list and you're
on it, and say it's me Mimi. That's right, Thank you, Mimi.
I agree with you. I think Fuck was being yum yucked.
(48:51):
I also kind of see why some people were upset
with him. So I'm just since I'm Switzerland over here, okay,
but wash h. If you want to be like Mimi
and get in touch with us to defend shock or
you know, take them down to peg whatever, as long
as it has nothing to do with me, you can
send us an email to Stuff podcast at iHeart radio
(49:13):
dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a production of
I Heart Radio. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit
the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of I
Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh,
and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too, and this is
a episode of Stuff you should Know. I thought you
can say, welcome to the Bossom Cast. I thought about it,
(00:23):
and my brain wouldn't wouldn't form that together. I was like,
there's a there's a pun in here, and I can't
quite grasp it. So that's good. Your your pungen is
being dulled. Yeah, it's funny those pungens. They're bald and
they have like sheet white skin. I'm not even sure
(00:44):
what that means. It means that they look a lot
like Jonathan Strickland. I wondered if that's what you meant. Yeah,
goodness me, man, I haven't heard from him in a
long time. You don't think Strickland tan's up? No, No,
I think Strickland up pours the sun. Okay, just a little,
just a little note between you and me. I got
(01:05):
a question for you. Okay, does this episode on possums
or opossums? They're both correct, It's fine either way, right.
Does this have anything to do with a certain Instagram follower?
It does as a matter of fact, Oh good, we
have an Instagram follower and there they Their handle is
(01:29):
underscore G. I O I underscore G and I clicked
in on it and they have a pronunciation, so I
guess it's d oh yeah, okay. And they have been
posting since April um. They said they I think I
found their first posters on April four and they said, um,
(01:49):
I'm going to post every time you post asking for
a Possum episode until you finally do. And they have
been doing that ever since. I don't think they've missed
a single one. Uh yeah, I mean she's persistent. I'll
say that, yeah for sure. And maybe you get what
you want when you're persistent because we're doing the episode.
(02:09):
I'm just curious what she's gonna be up to after this. Nothing.
They always goes to us after that, they're like, thanks, chumps.
Well here's what I have to say to you, stranger
but friend on Instagram. Uh, don't just come at us
with some new topic and badgers about that one, especially
not badgers, especially not badgers. You're getting your possums to
(02:34):
just settle down and enjoy it. You got what you wanted. Yeah,
I have to say not just persistent too, but um
they were. Also they got kind of funny because after
a while he just got sick of saying, like, possum
episode please. So for the Nintendo episode, they said that
any yes, is the only system we had as kids.
(02:54):
Otherwise we played outside with possums. No. No No, she's gotten
very creative with how she were in the possum thing,
and I think that's that was part of the charm
of it. Otherwise it would have just ignored it out
of some weird game. Yeah for sure, Yeah, absolutely for sure.
So yes, that is that is the impetus for this
possum episode. But I'm glad that they they suggested it
(03:15):
because I was fine with possums before. But I learned
a lot about possums oral possums researching this episode. And
I gotta tell you, I'm I'm a friend of the possum.
Now I am too. At some point you'll hear a
first person possum story from me. I just don't know
when I'm gonna work it in. That's what in the
(03:37):
BIS they call it a teaser. Uh. And if you
want to just stop before you even listen any further,
if you're near somewhere where you can watch a YouTube video.
Just look up Butter bu t t e r at
the Possum pet on YouTube and just go ahead and
tell me after that that you think possums are like us,
(04:00):
are scarier, weird FTC Butter uh work Butter's charms. Okay,
I'll go look. I'll go look up Butter later on.
But you can imagine is a pet possum who was rescued, rehabbed,
I think, with the idea of going back into the wild.
But as we'll see, that doesn't always take because sometimes
that possum just wants to go back inside and snuggle. Yeah,
(04:22):
it sounds like Butter's rehab or checked all the right boxes. Yeah,
it's a very cute video. So one of the things
that I learned about possums is that I've got um,
not only my friend of the possum, I've got possum pride. Now,
possom fever that a little bit of that too, but
more more pride than anything, because Chuck there there's a
(04:43):
there's one specific possum, the Virginia possum, that is native
to the United States, traditionally the southern southeastern United States um,
and that Virginia possum is the only marsupial native to
the United States, and our friends listen in Australia are like, crikey,
We've got a million of those here. We'll get this Australia,
(05:05):
your marsupials seem to have come according to the fossil
record from the America's which means that our possum friends
are actually the predecessors of your marsupials, which means chuck.
That means that the wombats, the dumbats, the dun Arts,
(05:26):
the kangaroos, kalas, and the qualls, the bilbies in the bandicoots,
Tasmanian devil, Pasmanian tiger, not to mention the wallabies, they
all descend from a North American or South American possum,
because that's where all marsupials came from. You forgot about
fairy toasts, yeah, which apparently you don't toast. Yeah, big correction, Sorry, Australia,
(05:51):
you don't toast very bread. I registered an angry email
to the editor of the blog that I got that
idea from. By the way, Oh that was from you.
What the fairy fairy toast? Yeah? Yeah, you didn't mention it.
Did you know I thought that I thought that was
submitted by Libya. Okay, I know I found that one.
(06:13):
I'm throwing myself under the bus. All right, well I'm
driving that bus, buddy, so I'm gonna hit the brakes
and I'm not gonna I'm gonna back up so you
don't get hit. Oh I got that's an inside. Uh So,
your little spiel on possums pointed out a couple of
(06:33):
things that I want to point out. One is that
possums are not rodents. Yeah. I think a lot of
Americans probably think they're kind of in the rat family
or something because they look sort of rat like, But
they're not. Like you said, they're more soupials. And the
other thing is, well, that's it, they're more soup heals.
So they have little pouches just like a kangaroo friends,
(06:56):
and they keep a little there called Joey's to their
little babies or Joey's. Yeah, a baby apossum is called
a Joey and cute. Like. I knew what marsupials were,
but what I didn't realize is that it was, as
far as I can tell, one of two categories that
mammals can land in depending on how they they're young,
justest date and a marsupial is just a type of
(07:17):
animal that, evolutionarily speaking, really emphasizes the lactation phase of
development of young, whereas us and just about every other
mammal um we're called placentals. We just date our young
in the womb for much longer. Um possums, it's a
very short time, and then they're in the pouch lactating
(07:39):
for a really long time. Yeah. I was surprised to
see that when they were born there very very tiny,
like on the order of just an inch or so. Yeah,
I saw a honey bee size in one place. That's
a little possible. And then they're in that pouch like
sometimes up to like seventy days. Yeah, getting mother's milk
(07:59):
from mom the possum. Yeah. So we'll get to that.
We'll get to that, don't don't. Let's not get ahead
of ourselves. I know, I'm excited to chuck. But um,
back to the fossil record. So uh, it turns out
that the the ancestor of all marsupials seems to have
emerged in North America, maybe South America at the very least,
if they emerged in North America. They traveled down to
(08:21):
South America and then Antarctica and then Australia back when
all that stuff was connected. And I mean they're really
really old. Um. I saw a hundred and forty million
years old um. And then the immediate ancestors of possums,
which look very similar to today's possums. They have not
changed very much, um since about the time the dinosaurs
(08:42):
went away sixty five million years ago, right, and since
then we've had possums of various types running around Earth.
But at one point they died off in North America.
Luckily they were a bunch left in South America. And
when the Sthmuths of Panama rose again from the sea
like poseidon um, like the October. Yeah, just as good,
(09:07):
maybe even better chuck uh, they were able to travel
back up to North America. And about a million years ago,
our friend the Virginia possum evolved and basically said, I
really like the Southeast and I'm gonna stay here for
the next million years. That's right, And you know what
I've forgot. The other thing I was gonna say after
your spiel was that you Aussie's out there, you do
(09:29):
have something called a possum. Oh yeah, it's not what
we have as a possum. It's a it's a different
animal altogether. So there is a little bit of confusion there.
So if you're if you're buttering up your fairy toast
right now and you're really upset, you're like, I've got
possums on a lot of these trees. You probably do,
but they're not. They're not, and I looked them up.
They're very cute too, but they're not like our possums.
(09:50):
They are the ones that I saw are called bush
tail possums, and they are super cute. But that's a
big difference are possums. The Virginia possum spends most of
its time on the ground, climbs trees, maybe to find food,
maybe to escape a predator. The bush tail possums basically
live in trees. They live high up. But they're both marsupials.
But there's actually we can pinpoint the jackass that actually
(10:13):
created this confusion back in the seventeen fifties. His name
was Joseph Banks, right, that's right, um, sorry, the seventeen seventies.
Seventeen seventies, what did you say in seventeen fifties. I
think I should have said the seventeen fifties, give or
take a couple of decades. Banks was a brit He
was a naturalist, and he went to Australia with James
(10:35):
Cook and in seventeen seventy founder Marsupial and basically said
it was the same thing that we had in North
America and it really wasn't at all. And uh, you
know that that's where that all came from. Yeah, so
there's there's your confusion. I guess technically Australia that means
that our possums are the real possums. I'm not trying
(10:57):
to start a flame war here, I'm just saying that
seems to be the case. Yeah, And and since we're there,
we might as well cover the opossum thing out of
the gate and then we can really get down to business,
because they're all correct. Opossum is just fine. Uh. In fact,
that that's the original wording that came from an Algonquin
word um A p o s o u m a
(11:20):
palsum I guess, which means white beast or white dog.
And you know you can use either one. You can
say o possum you can say possum. You can spell
it opossum, you can spell it possom. Yeah. And apparently
in Europe, uh, in the Enlightenment period, the eighteenth century,
they were nuts for these things. Uh, and they they
(11:42):
I guess somebody gave them one to the Royal Society
in London. Sorry, this is back in the mid seventeenth century,
so the sixteen hundreds. And they looked at it and
they're like, this thing is a pouch. It's weird looking.
I declare that it's probably a cross between a fox
and an ape, some sort of hybrid. That turned out
not to be the cases. We'll see. Like you said,
possums are their own thing. So let's talk about where
(12:06):
you find them here in the United States, because we
should say from this basically, from this point on, we're
gonna we're gonna be talking about the Virginia possum, the
American United States possums, right, that's right. Uh. You can
tell by their little flashy red, white and blue jumpsuit
that they wear. It's very cute. So you mentioned the southeast,
(12:27):
and that is very much true. Uh, that is where
they were really hanging out for a long time. But
starting in about I guess, let should say at least
the nineteenth century, they started moving on along elsewhere in
the country, and they kind of spread around. They were
I think they saw him in the mid eighteen hundreds
in New York and then other parts of New England
and then the Midwest, and basically, as like farms and
(12:50):
cities and urban population started springing up, possums kind of
followed suit. Because possums, as we'll find out, and you know,
every animals really food motivated, but it seems that possums
are really really food motivated. So then there were things,
you know, a lot more things to eat in a
lot more places. So possums started traveling around naturally, and
apparently people even took them and dropped them off in
(13:13):
other parts of the country, including Washington State. So I'm
not really positive, but it seems like you might find
a possum almost anywhere in the United States. Now. It's weird.
I saw a map of their distribution and if you
go up from North Texas and then spread out toward
(13:35):
Idaho to the left, and then up towards like maybe Ohio,
Illinois to the right, it almost make like a cartoon
tornado shape coming out of Texas. They're not there. You're
not going to find them there, really weird, but you
will find them surrounding the northwest California, Texas, Mexico, and
(13:55):
then all down the southeastern United States and now up
the eastern side of the Midwest and all along the
Eastern seaboard up to Ontario, the lower Upper Peninsula of Michigan.
Talk about a mind blower, that is. Yeah, I think
they they got their passports in order and wandered into Canada. Yeah.
So these people are so friendly, Yeah, and they talk
(14:18):
kind of funny and they're very charming. Yeah, that's what
you just nailed, Canada and leftover poutine in the back alley.
There's nothing to turn your little pink nose up at. No,
and food definitely did help them. They're they're like, I
like these humans. They're pretty great, and I'm glad they
came along because, yes, they're a huge constant food source um,
but we're also a source of shelter too, because um
(14:41):
possums have a very bare, naked tail that is really
off putting to a lot of people, and understandably so,
their ears are also naked, and when you put those together,
they can get things like frost bite. Um, they can
not survive the cold all that well. They do develop
a winter coat, but they're just they like it warm
for the most part. But as humans have moved further
(15:03):
and further north and um, the possums have followed us
because we have barnes addicts call spaces uh wall voids
like just places for possums to to live in the
colder months. So that's another reason why they their range
has expanded to Yeah, and the old Virginia possum. Uh,
you've seen them around there, about the size of a cat,
(15:25):
like a house cat, way anywhere from four to eleven pounds, uh,
eleven pound possum. That's that's pretty decent sized possum. I
thought up to fourteen my friend. Oh, I'm sure that.
I'm sure the tubbier varieties can can pack it in
for sure. That will make your forearms burned carrying that
around uh two to three ft long, and that's with
the tail. And generally the Virginia possum you would describe
(15:48):
as sort of whitish gray. Their faces are a little
more white, their bodies are kind of gray. But sometimes
they'll have little spooches and splotches and bands and things
like that. Um, all right, so I think that's a
good teaser. And then atomically speaking, and Adam, what's the word?
I think you had it? And anatomically is that right? Yeah?
(16:10):
It doesn't sound right though, does it? No? It sounded weird. Um.
But let's take a break and we'll sort that out
and then we'll come back and talk about possum penis
right after this. All right, you just bring it on out, please, Well,
(16:51):
a possum has a forked penis. And if you can
look up a picture and it, um, well, I guess
it looks like what do you think it looks like?
I am not a sick Oh? So I didn't look
it up. Oh you didn't mean you're sick. Oh, I know,
I'm teasing. I didn't look it up. I I know
kind of what it must look like because from the
(17:13):
description Livia put of both the forked penis and the
multiple vagina, is that female possums have. I got the
gist of it. Yeah, well you just there there it
is right there. I buried the lead. Um. Although we
should say that colonial Americans once again proved, uh, they
had some ingenuity going. But sometimes it could be quite
dumb because they saw this forked penis and they said, oh,
(17:37):
well that is because they impregnate the female through their nostrils.
What else could it be. We know this because we
saw the female possums sticking their nose into their pouches
and they're giving birth and sneezing out their little Joey's
that way right. No, no, I'm saying you got that right,
(17:58):
You got it super super wrong out. Sure, but no,
it's because they so yeah, if you look up there,
it looks a lot like a nematode, a worm of
some sort with a club a club foot basically, yeah,
so um, but yes, the reason it's forked is because
the females have two vaginas that can um, that can
(18:19):
be fertilized by sperm, or that can move sperm to
their ova. Yeah I think I got it right. Um,
and they have a third one for actually giving birth.
So that's why the penis is forked. Because they're just like,
you know, double your pleasure, doubles, you're fun. They look
like little pincers actually, like I guess I'm not seeing
(18:40):
a close up. All the ones I'm seeing are like
they're like, get a load of this. It's really long.
Oh really okay, let me just type in possum penis
close up. I'm just gonna go for it. Where are
you typing in? Beforeis right? Oh? I had the Google
filter on. I see. Yeah, there's one very clear picture.
(19:01):
It looks like a little look like little pincers from
an insect or something safe searches on. Look at you.
I'm just kidding, what the heck was That's not at
all what I just saw. Well, all right, oh no,
that's a baby possum being born. It's like, what is that?
(19:23):
Regardless as a penis? Okay, it's got a forked penis.
Let's talk about their teeny tiny brains, because they do.
And Livia even put that the wording teeny tiny brains
one of the smallest brain to body ratios and mammaled them.
Uh and it's kind of cute. Olivia also included a
little brief thing of like, how do you find out
how big a brain is in little mammals? Well, you
(19:46):
take their skulls. If you're scientists, and you put dried
beans in there, and then you I would say, you
would probably guess the beans is an office, like you know, uh,
white elephant gift kind of thing. But then they obviously
can out the beans and that's how they tell It
makes very good sense, but it seems kind of cute
and rudimentary. It does, but I mean it does reveal
(20:08):
something really um surprising about the possums. They have a
really small brain to body ratio compared to other animals
their size. Like the possums brain case held beans, just
little beans, not that many. What kind of bean ownder
I'm gonna say lentils now, now that's really small. Would
like the usually the fun version is jelly beans. Sure,
(20:31):
that's kind of big, though, maybe a black eyed pea
or something. Okay, we'll go with black eyed piece, dried
black eyed piece. They hold twenty five of those. Cats
held a hundred and twenty five, Raccoons held a hundred
and fifty. And that actually seems to support this longstanding
notion that possums are actually kind of dumb. Not true.
They're not really dumb at all, and in fact, there's
(20:52):
plenty of tests that they've shown their actually surprisingly intelligent.
They beat out rats, rabbits, dogs, cats on um remembering
where to find food, and then the maze the old
standby for proving intelligence in an animal. They actually can
beat rats and cats in learning mazes, that's right. And
(21:12):
UH also can remember if they've had something that made
them sick to eat that they even just tasted like
a year later. So again, I think this food thing
is really important because it seems like they score really
well when there's food involved. Uh. Like you mentioned, they're
found in a lot of places in the United States.
(21:32):
They really love a dense forest, but you'll see them
in cities all over the place. They eat everything basically. Um,
they eat little mammals, eat worms, eat insects, eat birds
and reptiles, eat seeds and fruits, and obviously garbage there
you know, like the raccoon. They will you will find
(21:52):
them in a garbage can, just go into town on
like a pizza box or something. Yeah, but I saw
Chuck that they're often unfair really blamed for knocking over
garbage cans because they're the ones who come along after
the thing that knocked it over, a raccoon or a
dog or something, and they're just scavenging. But they get
to blame because they're the one that gets caught. Not fair,
(22:13):
just another miscarriage of justice exactly. What about when you
see one walk around the day, that means they're rabbit? Right, No, again,
another misconceptions there. If if they're walking around the day,
it means that they eating is so good that they've
abandoned their nocturnal ways and are just doing the human
(22:35):
thing and eating whenever they want. They don't have to
wait until nighttime to look for food. They can find
at anytime. So no, if you see a possum, it
does not mean it's rabbit. And as a matter of fact,
possums tend to actually be um cleaner than other animals,
both disease wise and with fastidiousness. There there as fastidious
as cats and cleaning themselves, and they actually clean themselves
(22:57):
in similar ways, licking their paw and we're up in
their face with the back of their paw. It is
super cute. And while they do that chuck, they stand
up on their hind quarters and balance themselves with their
cute little weird tail. They also have mouths that are
cleaner than other animals like cats, and because they have
a really low body temperature, they're very unlikely to catch rabies,
(23:20):
which means they're also very unlikely to transfer rabies to you.
So if you're ever bitten by a possum, which is
a very unusual thing. Indeed, as we'll see you are,
probably you can just go start reading the newspaper. We
don't even have to go to the hospital or anything.
Just sit down and get back to your coffee, right,
Like it's what drinking coffee reading a newspaper. Don't you
(23:42):
know that gen Z is really into throwback stuff, are they?
Are they reading newspapers now? If they're not now, I
predict they will be in six months and then in
seventeen months they'll be done with newspapers. Uh. Possums are
also great to have around, um, your neighborhood or your farm. Uh.
They will eat and this is astounding. Uh, they love
(24:04):
ticks and they will eat five thousand ticks in a
single like three or four month period over a season. Man,
talk about possum pride chuck. Oh huge, And you know
that's a very big deal for people like me that's
been a lot of time in the woods and tickboard
and disease is such a big thing, you know in
the South. Uh, Like I said, if you had a farm,
they're gonna eat um critters and vermin that are gonna
(24:26):
be making your crops not so great. And the eating slugs,
they're gonna be eating beetles. Uh, they're gonna you know,
that rotten fruit in that apple tree that you don't
care for, They're gonna love that tree because they're gonna
eat everything that's drop on on the ground. And if
they're mice and rats around, they'll probably chase them off
or eat them and or eat them. Yeah, because they
will eat basically anything like even actual garbage. Like you said, um,
(24:51):
they'll also eat carrion, which makes them a really unusual
animal because there's not many animals out there that actually
are carrion eaters. But if they come along road kill,
they'll eat the road kill. And in fact, they've been
known to eat entire rabbits uh that they find as
road killed. Because they have such a need for calcium,
(25:11):
they will, um, they will eat the entire skeleton because
they have to. They got to get that calcium big time.
But because of this, because they're so good at cleaning
up an environment, an ecosystem that they come along to,
their um sometimes called nature sanitary engineer. See no one,
no one ever says that. No, well, we're saying that
now I love it. Possum pride. We should get we
(25:34):
should get shirts. I think we should too. Uh. As
far as they're bedding down and stuff like that, they
are not ones that are typically gonna build their own den. Uh.
They're more like um rehabbers. They will go into someone
else's abandoned in and they'll fix it up a little bit.
They'll bring their own grass and twigs and leaves and
(25:56):
kind of line it and uh and cover up any
drafty areas if they want to stay warmer. But they're
not gonna stick around for too long. They just hold
up on these dens for a few days. They're probably
resting there during the day. They have found that, um
a little mamas. Maybe there for a few weeks at
a time, if they found a really good hidy hole
(26:18):
because they've got a lot going on with their little
Joey's in there, or if it's in the wintertime or something.
But they do they do travel. They will get around
in a surprising fashion, right. Yeah. They Some guy tagged
them with alright guess r f I D trackers and
found that, um, some of them will move up to
(26:40):
fifteen miles in a few weeks. Maybe that's that's a
long way with those little legs. Yeah. Um. And that's
actually an argument against keeping possums as pets is that
you're probably not going to be able to get them
the exercise that they would get in the wild. They
move around a lot. Yeah, just stffif. Or another way
(27:02):
to put it is, if you have a postum pet,
you need to take them out for a walk quite frequently.
Oh man, I'd love to see that. Um. You mentioned
how they'll like line the dens or burrows that they
borrow from other animals with like twigs and leaves and
stuff like that. The way that they collect that stuff
is they have um opposable like thumbs basically on their
(27:25):
front and back feet, and so they'll gather like leaves
with their front their front hands basically is what they're called.
They'll push them under themselves to their back feet there
with their feet, they'll kind of bunch them up, and
then they pick it up with their tail and they'll
carry it off to the den in their tail, like
the old person with the bundle of sticks on the
(27:46):
cover of led Zeppelin front, but with the tail instead. Yeah,
the old guy with the tinder bunch on his back. Yeah, Uh.
They and you know, speaking of tails, you've kind of
dropped a little tail tidbits here and there. Uh, they
can hang from those tails. It's not something you're gonna
see a lot. And I get the impression just from
looking at pictures that younger possums hang from their tail
(28:09):
a little bit more than full grown ones. It's probably
because it's it's taxing once you're like a you know,
eleven pound possum to hang from your tail. But they
will do it every now and then. If you look
up pictures of hanging possums, they'll they'll use that tail
to wrap around a branch every now and then. Yeah,
they're they're they're I think the only animal in North
America with the prehensible tails, right, which means they can
(28:32):
use the tail as an like a fifth hand. Yeah. Um.
The other thing about that, though, is the idea that
they sleep upside down hanging from their tails. That seems
to be cartoon myth. Essentially, they don't do that. They
sleep in their burrows. Yeah, they're not, like, they're not bats. No,
do you want to talk about um little baby possums now? Yeah,
(28:57):
they're super cute. Um. I guess the sad part that
we should go ahead and say is that apossums life
is pretty short. It's about two years in the wild, um,
maybe three or four if they're living in someone's house. Yeah.
You hear two years and you're like, well, yeah, all
those cars are skewing it downward for sure. But no,
if they're in captivity and it's just another year or
(29:18):
two more, they they're just not destined to live very long. Yeah,
I'm sure the cars don't help, though, No, for sure.
I've never ran over a possum. Thankfully. That's great. I
think you should have a key chain that says that.
But you know what I did do one time. I
think it's a good time for my story. Okay, you
know what, let's save the story for the next break.
(29:38):
Oh my god. Uh. As far as their litters, this
is another thing that's a little you know. I guess
it's sort of why they've been around for you know, however,
many tens of millions of years. But it is a
little sad. They will have um way more babies, generally
than they have ability to feed them. The mom has
(30:01):
a maximum of thirteen nipples, sometimes not even that any,
and sometimes they will have up to five little half
inch babies, uh, anywhere from four to twenty five. But
you know that means in some of these litters, half
of them literally just won't have literally won't have food
for mama, and they're just you know, they're basically abandoned. Yeah,
(30:25):
the mom's like natural selection sucks. Kids are no but
we but we survive over the long term. So um,
the like we said, the little baby possums are about
the size of a honeybee. When they're born, they just
state in the womb. For Olivia says twelve the thirteen
days I saw twenty eight days, um, and then after
(30:47):
that they're born, but they're kind of just partially born.
They emerged from the womb wearing something called the paraderm,
which is essentially like a um a placenta that they
can that's wrapped around them. It's like as snuggy, but
a placenta version of it. And the only openings they
have to them in the world are holes for their nostrils,
(31:08):
because they use their sense of smell throughout their lives.
But even like the first thing they do is use
their sense of smell and then their mouth, which they
used to latch onto the nipple, and when they come
out of the birth canal, they climb up to that pouch,
climb in and latch onto a nipple. And the reason
that they know to climb upward is because they have
a sense of smell, so they know where to go
(31:30):
based on the sense of smell. They also know to
climb upward because the other sense that they're born with
is a sense of gravity, so they know what's down
and what's up. And with those two things, they can
emerge blind and deaf with only a sense of smell
in a mouth um to to climb up and basically
survive if they can find a nipple latch onto man.
Birth order really matters in a situation like this. Really
(31:53):
you here, I am, Let's party. Uh. As far as
the kind of sounds they make, they um are are
pretty quiet generally, like, it's not like they walk around
howling or making weird noises. Uh. The mom will use
sort of a clicky sound um either during mating season
(32:15):
or to call their little babies back to the pouch
um and they can make a sort of hissing uh.
Livy describes as a growl too, But in my experience,
tease again, it's more of a hiss when a possum
feels cornered. Okay, yeah, that's all I've ever seen is
(32:35):
a like when a possum is angry, it's hissing. That's it, right,
or potentially playing possum. And that is a thing. It's
not a choice that they make. It's almost like a
fainting goat kind of situation. It is an involuntary response
if they have an extreme fear situation, and this is
after they've tried everything else. Uh, they will they will
(32:56):
go limp like a little fainting goat. They will fall down,
They poop themselves or pee themselves. They may stick their
tongue out and drool. Uh. And it all sounds kind
of funny, but it's kind of sad because they can't
do anything about it. And when they're like this, another
animal could just be ravaging them and they will still
be in that state. The thing is is that the
(33:17):
animals probably not doing that because when they just fall
over and seem dead, all of the triggers that that
create predation behavior in um, that animal that had them
cornered just suddenly turn off. And the animals like, what
was I doing? Oh yeah, I was chasing this ball
and that's it. You know. The possums left alone typically,
(33:37):
so it actually works really well, but that's like the
last last resort. The possums also really good at bluffing,
showing its teeth. They have fifty teeth and can bear
their teeth hiss like you said, um, they can growl um.
They can seem kind of intimidating, but the thing is
it's it's all bluffing, like they do not want to
(33:58):
fight your cat or your dog or you. And if
you have a possum that is sitting there hissing at
you or your dog or your cat, you're actually being
really cruel to it. They just want to be left alone,
and they're in an extremely stressful situation that they know
they can't really win. They're not good at fighting, um,
so they basically do what they can to appear sick,
(34:18):
like they'll drool, they'll release it really nasty fluid, and
then hope that you'll just leave them alone. And you
should leave them alone. But also when you're leaving alone,
realize like that that possum wasn't going to do anything.
It's it's just all talk basically, and that makes it
even cuter in my mind. I agree. I think it's
a great time for a second break in a perfect
(34:39):
setup for my story. Okay, we're back, and here is
(35:11):
my story. Uh, senior year in high school, going back
to my very first girlfriend's house. Mallory. Hi, Mallory, she
just ran for congress in Georgia. That sounds so made up, chuck, No,
she did. She lost. I had a girlfriend, you and nurse.
She's from Canada and she ran for congress. Uh. But
(35:32):
she was my very first girlfriend. We were going back
to her house after a date, walked her up onto
the front porch, uh, like I traditionally would do for
a little good lip smack and probably and we kind
of were laughing like we were always doing, and ran
up on the front, very small front porch, probably one
of those like a little, you know, five by five
front porches. And there was a possum on this porch
(35:56):
trapped and immediately turned around and started it was like
something out of a movie. Immediately turned around and started
hissing at us. Mallory starts screaming, I I'm not sure
what I did. I kind of froze. I think, like,
what am I supposed to do here? And Uh. This
possum immediately then tried to squeeze under the um the
(36:17):
railing to you know, get off the porch, and was
so tubby he got his little body stuck. And this
little possum was kind of stuck in hissing and wriggling,
Mallory screaming. I'm I was probably thinking, well, I'm definitely
not getting any lips smacking, thank you, bosom, and that
this problem that was my bossom story. Eventually wriggled his
(36:38):
way free and ran off. Okay, I had a good
laugh about it, but and no one was hurt. But
I had a very very very close encounter. We're talking,
you know, inches defeat. Uh, And it was funny. It's
a very fun memory for me. I wonder if that
possum remembered it later on too. I was just laughing
and shaking his head like I gotta lose some weight.
I wonder if that possum tells that story on it's podcast.
(37:01):
Does uh does Mallory remember that story? Oh, I'm sure
she does. I didn't. Uh, we're not very much in touch,
but I did see her a couple of years ago
at my nephew's wedding and We had a great time
catching up and and her meeting Emily and me meeting
her family. But we did not talk about the possum. Okay,
I bet you anything, she would remember. I think that
(37:22):
was a missed opportunity, Chuck, to talk about the possum. Yeah,
I probably should have mentioned it. So that's a great
possum story. The only possum story I have um is
I remember finding one in the wood pile outside of
our house in Ohio and my dad grabbing it by
its tail and carrying it over like to the woods
to release it. And that thing was trying to curl
(37:45):
up like toward my dad's arm. And at the time,
I was like, God, that possum would kill my dad
if I had the chance. And now I realized that
possum wasn't wasn't doing anything. He was just really mad
and really scared. Yeah, and they had those big fangs
we should mention. So it's it's a little intimidating when
one is when you're seventeen and one is hissing at
you on the front porch. But you know, your dad
(38:07):
was country strong. I guess he would I never thought
about that, but yeah, he is kind of country strong. Uh,
we mentioned having them as pets. Um, it's not a
great idea. They're not great pets because they don't let
you know when they're sick. You're probably not gonna have
a diet that's quite right for him. They're probably gonna
be undernourished under exercise. They're just not an animal that
(38:29):
you should keep in the house. Um. Some states say
you're not allowed to, others say you can if you
have a permit. But like you mentioned earlier, there are
rescue people who rehab them because you know, if mommy
gets hit by car or dies by any other way,
the babies are out there a lot of times and
their aim is to rehab them and send them back
(38:49):
into the wild. But sometimes it doesn't take and they
end up cute pets on YouTube. Man, that was a mouthful,
but you got it right though. Yeah. So, Um, there's
another way that people can interact with possums, and that
is by eating them. Apparently the indigenous tribes of North America,
and I'm guessing South America too, because there's plenty of
(39:10):
possum down there as well, but different species. Um, they
ate them. And this got passed along very quickly to
the earliest colonists to the America's who said it tastes
like pig. Basically, yeah, that seems to be like there
are several quotes here from Libya that where everyone roundly
(39:31):
agrees that they taste like pig. So I'll take their
word for it. I will too, But I'm like, okay,
I can totally understand why you would eat a postum.
Then all you have to do is here one time,
that thing over there tastes like pig, and people are
gonna eat it because you know, everybody likes the taste
of pig. But if you feel guilty about eating pig,
you've got the possum alternative out there for you. I
(39:53):
guess so. Uh. And the way it worked a lot
of times is they would want to catch the possum
alive rather than kill it, so they could bring the
possum home, and for a couple of reasons, they could
either save it for Sunday dinner because it's a little
more special of a meal maybe, And the other important
reason is, you know, you want to make sure that
possums not carrying again, they're not big disease carriers. But
(40:15):
they may not have known this back then. So this
sort of wisdom at the time was to uh, wait
a few days, feed it something good, maybe fatten it
up a little bit, huh, and make sure it's not sick,
and then kill it and need it. Yeah. And I
think in addition to making sure it was not sick,
just not knowing what eight but knowing that a possibly anything.
(40:35):
And if it hasn't passed that stuff yet, then you're
kind of eating it and you might be like, guh,
dead vulture. What it's a dead vulture? A possum does.
So the other thing that you could do, too, is
if you have it alive, you can wait until Sunday dinner,
which was a big thing and the joy of cooking.
Chuck had a recommendation um that if you feed a
(40:58):
trap possum, or if you trap a possum alive, feed
it milk and cereals for ten days. I guess, I
guess like maybe cookie crunch or something. Yeah, no, cookie crisp,
That's what it was. Honey nut cheerios, you name it.
M hm. Um, have you had the multi grain cheerios?
They're really good? Yeah, Rubyat says they're good. They're good. Um,
(41:20):
And then uh, for ten days you feed them milk
and cereal and then you can have them for dinner.
And then there's one other thing about it too. It
was apparently a traditional Thanksgiving food in a lot of
Southern places, right yeah, and Thanksgiving you they're gonna beating
all kinds of acorns and chestnuts and things like that
back when mast we had the American chestnut. Here's that
(41:42):
word again, mast uh. And I think that would fatten
them up and improve their flavor as well. So then
you got this naturally fatten possum for Thanksgiving, uh, where
you might make something called possuminator, which is a very
very popular dish, would was like red pepper or possum
baked with some sweet taters. Yeah. And the other thing
(42:06):
is you didn't need a gun. You wouldn't typically go
out and shoot a possum, which made it a very
like low barrier to entry for hunting mammals. You would
just like tree the possum and then basically shake the
tree and get that possum to fall out. And at
that point, the possum may even be playing dead, so
it's pretty easy taking I think exactly um, which is
(42:29):
so sad. I mean, that's they're easy to hunt because
they're kind of docile. You know. Tell that to Jimmy Carter. Yeah,
Jimmy Carter had a lot of them. Apparently said that
his family got through the depression by eating lots of possum.
And he's far from the only president that's possum adjacent um.
Apparently Washington sent some to an Irish member of Parliament,
(42:52):
Sir Edward Newen new In him in Jefferson like to
give them out to the French when he was the
Minister to France. And then uh Taft, William Howard Taft
was famously served one by the Atlanta Chamber of Commerce
in nine Yeah, and this one led to a you know,
(43:13):
because of uh, we should do it either a long
one on Theodore Roosevelt or a short one on the
Teddy Bear, or maybe a long one on the Teddy Bear.
But you know, the Teddy Bear came along thanks to
Theodore Roosevelt. And there was a cartoonist, Louis c. Greg
who had this idea, Well, now we have William Taft,
so what about Billy possum instead of Teddy Bear? And
(43:35):
even gave this Billy possum stuffed toy tow Uh Taft,
and I think Taft said, oh, this is great, but
it seemed like, you know, it just didn't fly. They
tried to get it to take off, and it just
didn't take off. Billy possum never took off. But we
have a great tidbit to end on that. I think
maybe the fact of the show what which is that
(43:57):
possums are highly highly resistant to not only just snake
bite but venom period. Right, that's absolutely true, man, And
apparently they found this out by accident. They were observing
possums in the wild and someone get bit by like
a rattlesnake, maybe in the Everglades, and they're like, man,
this possums toast and just looked, yeah, it's kind of
(44:22):
brushed his shoulders off and shrugged and walked away. And
the researchers were like, what is that. So they captured
possums and started exposing them to snake bites, which is
really mean. Those possums were like, what are you guys doing?
This is nothing. So they're like, okay, fine, possum, we're
gonna start injecting you intravenously with massive amounts of snake
(44:44):
venom and nothing like the most they could get out
of the possums was something that would look like a
like a human that wasn't allergic to a bee got
a beasting. Yeah, and and we're talking like cobras and
asps or an ugnc s. But vipers, yeah, pit vipers,
pit vipe or as rattlesnakes. Like it wasn't like, uh,
you know, the more severe venom had a worse effect.
(45:07):
The possum was still just like, have you not got
it by now? The venom doesn't bother us, exactly, stop
biting me and giving me shots. So they started looking
into the possums um mechanism for not getting sick or
dying from venom. And they have a special protein they
may be the only animal that has it that encapsulates
(45:29):
and deactivates the venom when it enters their bloodstream crazy
and just does nothing. And they're actually like this possum
protein might actually save lives and then weirdly, in a
weird twist, it also protects them against botuli is um too.
And to put a cherry on top of all of this,
they have synthesized what's called as lt n F lethal
(45:52):
toxin neutralizing factor. It's protein they've been able to synthesize
it now and they don't even need any more possum.
They can just keep resynthesizing it. And they're thinking like, hey,
this may be a literal like cure for snake bite, right, yeah,
Like how far away are they from just calling it
(46:13):
and saying, all right, guys, we got it days day
really okay, days at the very least pit vipers and
those are the ones you gotta worry about, you know.
So yeah, way to go, possums, possum pride? Am I right,
possum pride? You got anything else? I got nothing else? Well?
Big shout out as an f y I to Jerry's
daughter and Nez, who Jerry tells us loves possums, which
(46:38):
means that and as is ahead of the curve because
she loves possums before we did, So big ups in
s I love it, Yeah for sure. And since I
said big ups, and as it's time for a listener mail,
I'm gonna call this more defense of me and Gordon Lightfoot.
You just can't let this go, can you? Hey? I
(47:00):
keep getting emails. I've let it go. I think I
know the one you're talking about, and I agree with this.
This person if they're if it's the one I'm thinking of, Yeah,
it's for Mimi, And Mimi says this, Hey, guys, just
listen to the listener mail on toast and I feel
like I should apologize as a Canadian for the Canadians accusing,
accusing Chuck of young yuncking for not liking Gordon Lightfoot.
(47:20):
This is the one it, Mimi says. By the way,
I don't even know Gordon Lightfoot. Because I'm a millennial.
People are allowed to have opinions and not like things,
especially when the thing is so subjective, like different taste
in music and movies. I thought yum yucking was criticizing
or judging people negatively because of what they like. Yes,
I think in this way, Chuck is actually being yum
(47:42):
yucked by other people for the music he doesn't like.
It's all very meta. Uh And, on a personal note,
please come back to Vancouver. I've seen you when he
came in twenty seventeen. Uh Ford pinto no idea what
that was before your show? Even, Mimi, where do you live? Well,
apparently near Vancouver. Uh And is younger, so you know
(48:05):
that explains a lot. Anyway, I had tickets to your
March show before it was canceled. Oh, we had to
cancel Vancouver. Yeah, we just did San Francisco maybe or
we did one before. I can't remember. I think we
only did two shows and and yeah, Vancouver got canceled.
Well we out with the Vancouver to come back then.
I didn't remember that that was on the canceled list.
(48:28):
So uh, sorry about that, Mimi, But thank you for
getting my back. And here's a deal. If when we
come back to Vancouver, just reply to that email thread
that we had going and say guest list and you're
on it, and say it's me Mimi. That's right, Thank you, Mimi.
I agree with you. I think Fuck was being yum yucked.
(48:51):
I also kind of see why some people were upset
with him. So I'm just since I'm Switzerland over here, okay,
but wash h. If you want to be like Mimi
and get in touch with us to defend shock or
you know, take them down to peg whatever, as long
as it has nothing to do with me, you can
send us an email to Stuff podcast at iHeart radio
(49:13):
dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a production of
I Heart Radio. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit
the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen
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