What Do Opossums Eat? The Truth About the Tick Myth

July 30, 2026

Black-and-ivory linocut illustration of an opossum foraging among fallen fruit, insects, a snail, and woodland debris.

Opossums are opportunistic omnivores, which is a polite way of saying they eat whatever is available wherever they happen to be. Insects, slugs, snails, carrion, windfall fruit, eggs, small rodents, fungi, pet food, and the contents of an unsecured trash can all qualify. Their menu changes with the season and the neighborhood. What they probably do not eat, despite a decade of internet enthusiasm, is five thousand ticks a season.

What do opossums eat in the wild?

Invertebrates. Beetles, grasshoppers, earthworms, slugs, snails, and other small animals found while foraging on the ground.
Vertebrates and carrion. Frogs, small rodents, snakes, eggs, nestlings, and dead animals. Opossums are opportunists, not specialized hunters.
Plant food. Fallen fruit, berries, nuts, grains, grasses, and fungi. They usually take what is ripe, soft, and easy to reach.

The stomach contents of a wild opossum tend to look less like a menu and more like an inventory of the neighborhood. That flexibility lets the animal move between woodland edges, farms, suburbs, and cities without depending on one food source. Massachusetts wildlife officials list eggs, grains, nuts, fruit, birds, snakes, frogs, mice, and carrion among their primary foods.

What do opossums eat in winter?

Opossums do not hibernate, so they still need to forage through winter. The available menu simply gets narrower. Insects and soft fruit become scarce, while carrion, seeds, nuts, birdseed, compost, and food left by people become easier to find. During severe cold an opossum may stay sheltered for several days, then emerge when conditions improve and resume searching for food.

This is one reason a healthy opossum may appear during daylight in winter. Daytime activity by itself is not a diagnosis of illness; short days, cold nights, and food pressure can alter the usual nocturnal schedule. The seasonal behavior is covered in more detail in Do Opossums Hibernate?

Do opossums eat ticks?

Occasionally, and incidentally. An opossum grooming itself will swallow ticks it pulls off its own fur, so individual ticks certainly get eaten. What the evidence does not support is the popular next step: that opossums seek ticks out as food, or that having one in the yard meaningfully reduces the tick population.

The short version is that the laboratory result everyone quotes and the field evidence that followed it point in different directions, and the field evidence is the one that describes wild animals. When researchers examined the stomach contents of wild opossums, they found no ticks at all.

Where did the 5,000 ticks a season figure come from?

Not from any study that counted ticks eaten, which is the first surprise.

It grew out of a 2009 experiment at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies. Researchers placed 100 larval blacklegged ticks on each of several captive animals, opossums among them, then counted how many ticks dropped off over the following 96 hours. Very few did. The paper concluded that 96.5 percent of larval ticks that encountered an opossum and attempted to feed were apparently consumed, and reported that opossums and squirrels killed 83 to 96 percent of the ticks that tried to attach.

Notice the word apparently. The study counted the ticks that fell off and inferred the fate of the rest. It never reported a seasonal total. The familiar five thousand is a later extrapolation built on that grooming rate, produced by people writing headlines rather than papers.

What did the 2021 opossum diet study find?

Cecilia Hennessy and Kaitlyn Hild at Eureka College decided to test the inference directly. Rather than placing ticks on animals, they examined the stomach contents of 32 wild Virginia opossums from central Illinois under a dissecting microscope, searching exhaustively for ticks and tick fragments.

They found none: zero ticks and zero tick parts across all 32 animals. Ticks were present on some carcasses, attached to the outside of animals whose stomachs held no trace of them.

The researchers then reviewed 23 earlier studies of opossum diet, 19 based on stomach or digestive tract contents and four on scat. None had identified ticks either. They concluded that ticks are not a preferred food item for wild opossums and recommended checking laboratory observations against evidence from natural conditions.

Why did the laboratory and field studies disagree?

Because the studies were not asking the same question, which is easy to miss when both are summarized as “opossums and ticks.”

An animal in an enclosure with 100 larval ticks placed on it by hand has an artificial problem and one obvious solution: grooming. Grooming off a heavy experimental infestation and swallowing whatever comes loose is a plausible response. It is not the same thing as seeking ticks out as food in a landscape already full of slugs, beetles, fallen persimmons, and other easier meals.

The honest reading is narrower than either headline. Opossums groom heavily and may swallow individual ticks in the process, but ticks do not appear to be a meaningful part of their chosen diet. They are not a dependable form of tick control.

What do opossums eat around houses?

Around people, the menu expands to pet food, birdseed spilled beneath feeders, fallen fruit, open compost, poultry feed, and garbage. An opossum visiting a yard is usually following one of those smells rather than choosing the property as a permanent home.

Deliberately feeding one is not helpful. Reliable food can keep animals concentrated around a house, attract raccoons and skunks, increase conflict with pets, and teach wildlife to associate people with meals. The useful form of hospitality is subtraction:

feed pets indoors and bring bowls in before dusk;
use tight-fitting lids on garbage and compost containers;
clean spilled seed beneath bird feeders;
pick up fallen fruit and secure poultry feed;
give a passing opossum space and an open route away.

An opossum may still pass through, work over the slugs and beetles, and continue to another feeding ground without becoming dependent on yours.

What do baby opossums eat?

Very young opossums nurse inside their mother's pouch. Older juveniles gradually begin eating the varied omnivorous diet of adults. That biological answer should not be treated as a recipe for feeding an animal found alone.

Baby opossums require species-specific care, and an animal that is cold, dehydrated, or injured can be harmed by food or liquid given at the wrong time or by the wrong method. Do not offer cow's milk and do not force water into its mouth. Keep people and pets away, note where the animal was found, and contact a licensed wildlife rehabilitator, veterinarian, state wildlife agency, or animal control for instructions. A rehabilitator can also determine whether a juvenile is actually orphaned; a small opossum walking independently is not automatically abandoned.

Are opossums good to have around?

Yes, though for reasons quieter than the tick claim. Slugs, snails, beetles, carrion, and small rodents genuinely are on the menu. By consuming carrion they also remove material that would otherwise feed flies and other scavengers.

The 2009 tick paper contained another finding that the newer diet research does not overturn. Opossums were poor reservoirs for Borrelia burgdorferi, the bacterium behind Lyme disease, infecting far fewer feeding ticks than white-footed mice. That is an ecological effect, not a promise that an opossum will clear ticks from a yard.

The animal remains an unglamorous neighbor doing ordinary scavenger work. It is simply useful for documented reasons rather than miraculous ones, which is the usual shape of the truth about animals.

Frequently asked questions

What kind of fruit do opossums eat?

They eat many ripe or fallen fruits available within their range, including berries, persimmons, apples, grapes, and other soft fruit. Availability matters more than a single favorite species.

Do opossums eat mice and rats?

Yes, especially small or vulnerable rodents, but opossums are opportunists rather than dedicated rat hunters. Their presence does not replace ordinary rodent prevention.

Do opossums eat snakes or chickens?

Small snakes, eggs, and occasionally chicks can be taken. Secure poultry inside a predator-resistant enclosure at night rather than relying on identifying which visiting animal is responsible.

Will an opossum eat a garden?

It may take fallen fruit and soft ripe produce, but it also eats slugs, snails, and insects found in the same garden. Picking produce promptly and removing fallen fruit reduces the invitation without harming the animal.

From the archive

The opossum's real eating habits, less mythologized and more accurate, are the subject of Technically Edible Opossum: Study II, and the anatomy gets its own plate in Opossum Guide. Related field notes: Do Opossums Hibernate? and Opossum Playing Dead. The full file is kept in Opossum Shirts.