'Possum Note

I saw the resident 'possum this morning for the first time in months. He (she?) was trundling through the yard with a big wad of dead leaves held in his tail. I suspect there's nest-building going on, but I can't figure out why. 'Possums don't need nests for their young -- they have these handy pouches that serve until the little ones are big enough to hang on to mom's back. I would expect nest construction to be a fall activity, what with needing shelter from the cold and snow.

Another of life's little mysteries.

(Random thought: we think of evolution backwards. That is to say, when we say an organism has adapted to an evironment, that exactly 180 from what actually happened. Any population -- and evolution is a matter of populations, not individuals -- has a range of potentials. When an environmental niche arises, some individual or group of individuals in that population is most likely going to be able to take advantage of it, so the adapation actually happened before it was necessary. That's quite a different thing.

Chalk it up to our indoctrination into linear, cause-and-effect thinking, which leads to mistakes like think that we are the pinnacle of evolution: that's where the idea of "common ancestors" comes into play. Every organism alive today is just as highly evolved as we are. It's just that none of the others evolved in quite the way we did, so you can't really think of chimpanzees as not-quite-people. They are chimpanzees.)