The Opossum's Story

Opossums are a very common animal wherever I've lived in the US. They are nocturnal so they are often seen as roadside kill along the side of the road, and not often seen live, but there are a lot of them around. They are found throughout North and South America and are known as "marsupials" because they are mammals who carry their young in a pouch. They are also known as "omnivores" because they can eat a wide range of foods, both "meat" (insects, snails, lizards, bird eggs or fledglings, carrion or the discards of human's meals in garbage) and fruits and vegetables (such as roots.) They are a humble and almost considered like a trashy animal by some nowadays (though their meat and fur were much valued by early settlers in this country) and much fun is made of their "playing dead" when faced with a threat. When an opossum faces extreme danger, it literally goes into a deathlike state of "coma," probably evolved so that it causes the opossum's attacker to leave it for dead. There's a picture and some good info under its listing in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opposum.

Now, why am I writing about the Opossum? There's a marvelous evolutionary story about them that I'd like to share to provoke some thought. This story is not unique to the opossum, but I selected the opossum to talk about because of its extraordinarily humble qualities plus one other reason: they are incredibly fertile, with a female opossum bearing as many as twenty tiny young per litter, once or twice a year, and is able to nurse about a dozen!

Opossums first evolved 100 million years ago, and are among the first of the mammals. Think about it, this very species that I've often seen in my back yard is the same species and form as it was 100 million years ago. They have been, during that time, some of the easiest prey imaginable - they don't fight predators, they fall into that "coma" state when highly threatened... so they have been some of the easiest pickings as food by fierce predators, reaching back a hundred million years. How is it that they survived? Because of their fertility and the female's single minded focus on raising the young until they are independent. If you see a picture of an opossum with young, you can often see multiple young clinging on her back as she provides for them. She is constantly with them because they are constantly with her... she does not check them into opossum day care, or abandon them before they can fend for themselves and feed. She does not think that "two children are the ideal number to have" so that she can "self actualize." As a result the humblest of species, the opossum, has lived UNCHANGED for 100 million years.

Here's a mental exercise to put the time of the opossum into context with the time of "civilized humans." It's only 5000 years ago that the first few of the great civilizations of humankind emerged. For example, you can think back to the time of the Pharaohs, since I know a lot of people are really kind of goofy about their arcane knowledge and times, thinking that Egyptian magicians had all sorts of answers about the nature of the universe, the Book of the Dead, and so forth. If you consider that 5000 years as the great time span of human's "civilization" then to equal the time span that opossum "society" and "family" has existed, you would have to live the time back to the Pharaohs twenty thousand times. That's right... opossums in their current form have lived in their existing form twenty thousand times longer than humans have lived in their "civilized" form. The opossum even recovered from a long period of local extinction (they were missing for about 30 million years in North America but thrived in South America) with the South American opossums eventually repopulating the missing population of opossums in North America.

I think that it is a powerful, science based lesson that can remind humans today why a life based culture is essential to survival. Smarts, sophistication, and deadly weapons were not keys to opossum survival, and neither were the disappearing and devaluing of motherhood, and the aborting of inconveniently large litters. This humble animal serves as a reminder about why being fruitful is such a pervading theme and imperative throughout the Bible. I'm not talking just about the physical survivability of the species either. I'm talking about the constancy of it. You would recognize a 100 million year old opossum if you saw one alive today. Sometimes becoming more sophisticated and aggressive only serves to lose what one has. That's the lesson of the Garden of Eden, with the tree of knowledge and the tree of life. Now, humans are not even recognizable from generation to generation. I can tell you that human behavior has changed so radically in the fifty years that I have observed it close up that I wonder what folks are thinking is going to happen to them, what they have wrought, and done to themselves and their children. So think about that humble opossum and like me, wonder if "civilized" humans will exist even two spans of that time back to the Pharaohs, say nothing of the twenty thousand times the opossum has thrived in its form and family.