Category: facebook

June 18 2023, 20:48

Yesterday I posted a video of an opossum speeding past my house at night. On nextdoor, a bunch of people wrote to me that they’re beneficial because they eat about 5000 ticks a week. Being curious, I went to Google how an animal the size of a cat hunts for millimeter-sized ticks that sit somewhere in the grass.

It turns out that things aren’t quite like that, or even not like that at all. A study on Virginia opossums was conducted by the Institute of Ecosystem Studies, Cary, USA, in 2009. Check out how they got to 5000 ticks a week:

The authors estimated this number by once placing a small amount (specifically, 100) of black-legged tick larvae on five captive Virginia opossums, then counted how many fell off over four days.

In the end, they discovered that on average only 3.5 tick larvae fell from each opossum, and the rest could not be found around the opossum, which led the authors to speculate that the ticks were eaten by the opossums during grooming.

Based on their assumption, that the average number of larval ticks on opossums in the northern part of New York state was 199 ± 90, the authors stated that “the overwhelming majority (96.5%) of tick larvae that encounter opossums and try to feed are apparently eaten.”

From which they inferred that during any peak week of larval activity, each opossum would need to host more than 5500 tick larvae to account for 199 successfully feeding.

Other scientists, specifically Cecilia Hennessy and Caitlin Hilde, analyzed the stomachs of 32 opossums. In the stomach contents of Virginia opossums, they found neither ticks nor their parts. They also conducted an active literature search for evidence supporting the ingestion of ticks. The search revealed 23 manuscripts, describing the analysis of the diet of Virginia opossums, 19 of which were conducted on the stomach or gastrointestinal tract content, and four of which were based on feces analysis. None of these studies found ticks in the food analysis.

It turns out, they don’t eat ticks. Kind of a big “discovery”. Everyone thought they ate them by the kilogram, labeled them as the sanitizers of the forest, and there you have it.

I checked LinkedIn for these two friends who were digging through the stomachs of 32 opossums.

Cecilia has an interesting career – she published an article in 2021, and that same month left her position as assistant professor, and a year later got a job as a biology teacher in a regular school. Since February of this year, she has been working as a DNA Analyst in the legal department of Winsconsin.

Caitlin Hilde was actually in her fifth year of college at the time of publication. Seems like she just graduated and is job searching now.

June 12 2023, 12:44

This amusing sketch from Balmer in 1986 ends with the words “$99! Order today!.. Except in Nebraska”

I googled why, and it turned out to be quite funny. For many years, there were a whole bunch of things that were available “except in Nebraska”.

During the Cold War, when telephone systems were a Bell monopoly, there simply weren’t enough phone lines… except in Nebraska, where, it is said, the Strategic Air Command insisted on a huge number of them in case of nuclear war. Evidently, the nuclear war did not extend beyond Japan and certainly didn’t reach Nebraska, so most of the time these lines remained unused. Another theory suggests that this was facilitated by the state’s location and infrastructural capabilities.

A whole bunch of mail-order companies set up call centers there because it was one of the few places where you could come and order a whole bunch of lines for business.

However, according to Bell company rules, you could not use an 800 number simultaneously for calls out of state and for in-state calls. Therefore, companies had two options — either set up two numbers, one for 98% of US residents calling out of state, and one for locals… or simply indicate (as required by advertising law) that the particular offer was not available in Nebraska. Many did just that, and the meme became so entrenched that Balmer used it in this sketch.