New species of possum named after professor at UWO
OSHKOSH – Greg Adler, a University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh biology professor, was working on a research project in the forests near the Panama Canal in 2001 when he came across something unusual.
As Adler was studying the area, taking careful measurements of the surrounding forest and its canopies, he was also catching and releasing mouse possums to help track them. That was when he came across one that was, he said, “slightly different.”
Adler — an expert on rodents who has studied their role in tropical forest regeneration — noticed this possum’s tail was longer. But the biggest difference was its belly.
Unlike the possums in the area that had a salmon-colored belly, this one’s was brownish. He found a few others like that and collected one to send to an expert at the American Museum of Natural History.
Two decades later, Adler had nearly forgotten about those brown-bellied possums. But an email from Robert Voss, a curator with the American Museum of Natural History’s mammalogy department, brought it all back.
“‘Remember that possum you sent me?’ ” Adler recalls Voss saying in the email. “‘Well, it’s a different species and it’s not all that close to anything else.’ ”
Adler soon learned that, not only did he find a new species of possum, but the team that described the new species of possum named it Marmosa adleri, Latin for “Adler’s mouse opossum.”
Adler said that he and Voss had corresponded before on other research projects and even wound up working in the same places, but at different times. When Adler found out that Voss named the new species after him in part because of Voss’ “enormous respect” for his work, he was honored.
“It was very meaningful,” Adler said.
Adler’s self-described “fascination” with rodents came because there are so many species in very diverse habitats and roles in their ecosystems. That interest started at a young age, when he said his dad would take him and his brother to explore the forests behind their house in West Virginia.
He graduated from Washington and Lee University in Virginia in 1979 with a bachelor’s degree in biology before earning a Ph.D. in biology from Boston University in 1986.
Adler said that, although he doesn’t consider himself a possum expert, he ended up catching and studying them a lot throughout his nearly 30-year career of field work, which included time in Colombia, Panama, French Guyana, Vietnam, Taiwan, the Samoan archipelago and Venezuela.
Along with studying the relationships between rodents and their habitats, Adler has studied rodents and how they’re sometimes the hosts or reservoirs of infectious agents that could make humans sick.
Adler started working at UW-Oshkosh in January 1994, where he earned the honors of J. McNaughton Rosebush Distinguished Professor in 2005 and Outstanding Teacher in 2006. Although he mostly has taught upperlevel biology classes, he started teaching a biology lab for non-biology students.
“The best part of being a professor here is meeting students and interacting with them,” Adler said. “(Students) are really interested and motivated. It’s fun.”
Adler said Dec. 8, the day the article officially describing the new species of possum was published, was also the day of the last lecture for one of his classes. He got to tell his students about his unique honor at the end of the class, which was “very fun.”
Adler also said he hopes, in some ways, the new species named after him proves to his students one major lesson in his time in field work.
“I always tell my students, ‘If you’re outside, pay attention, you never know what you might find.’ ”