Two Myths That Never Die: Opossums and Ticks and Nail Polish and Chiggers

Myth 1: Chiggers & Nail Polish

  The welts were just their loving reminders – sort of like Google 5-Star reviews, saying, “Thanks for a great meal.”

Tall grass and overgrown fields are prime chigger and tick habitat

One myth you can count on hearing and seeing every September relates to chiggers and nail polish – namely that applying the polish to the itchy welt will suffocate the microscopic arachnid and alleviate symptoms. This has been proven false for decades, yet you still see some misinformed people chiming in on social media posts or commenting on articles about using nail polish on chiggers.

If you’ve spent any time outdoors, especially in brushy, tall grass areas in late summer or September, you have probably encountered chiggers. I recall getting them so bad on my ankles and feet about 30 years ago that self-amputation seemed like a plausible solution. My second worst case came more than a decade ago as I was conducting a Saturday war with sweetgum trees overtaking parts of my property. I was walking around, hatchet and an herbicide-filled squirt bottle in hand, conducting “hack and squirt” operations on small trees. Depending on the tree’s diameter, a hack or two with the hatchet through the bark into the wood’s cambium, followed by a squirt into the open wound results in a dead tree by next spring.

Those same overgrown areas where the sweetgum was sprouting turned out to be prime habitat for Trombiculidae, also known as harvest mites, berry bugs, or red mites or – commonly - chiggers. They’re arachnids, related to spiders and ticks.

Without any precautionary skin or clothing treatment from an approved insect repellent, I made fine dining for dozens of chigger larvae. You never get just one chigger bite. The females of that parasitic species are gracious enough to lay all their eggs in one concentrated place. These precious, little chigger larvae use their piercing mouth parts to attach themselves to your skin, hair follicles or pores, often biting the soft parts of your skin that fold or wrinkle. The chiggers then spit an enzyme into your skin, causing a chemical reaction that liquefies the area near the bite, turning you into food, something as tasty as mother’s milk to these hungry babies.

The bites usually don’t show until several hours after you’ve been nibbled. So, completely unaware I was chigger ridden and ignoring my wife’s recommendation to immediately shower after I finished my outside work, I plopped down on the loveseat to cool off and watch a little baseball. After slovenly strewing my infested shorts, shoes, socks and shirt across the bedroom carpet, I took a shower a few hours later. Of course, this was too late to mitigate the damage. The result was small, raised, itchy-as-hell, red welts that begin popping out all evening and the next day on my feet, ankles and thighs. By Monday, I counted 58 welts with more appearing over the next couple of days, some precariously close to, uh, sensitive areas. According to WebMD.com, if you get a chigger bite on your penis, you could get a condition known as "summer penile syndrome," something that causes swelling, itching and trouble peeing for up to a few weeks. Fortunately, I dodged that bullet.

The craving to scratch those welts was unbearable. They covered so much surface area that amputation was implausible; a pinpoint blowtorch was briefly considered and dismissed. Besides, the chiggers weren’t there anymore. By the time the itchy welts appear, the chiggers have dropped off. The welts were just their loving reminders – sort of like Google 5-Star reviews, saying, “Thanks for a great meal.”

My initial treatment consisted of a not-so-wee dram of bourbon and cortisone-based, anti-itch cream applied to the welts. I augmented the treatment by eating homemade jalapeno poppers, figuring a little burn in my mouth might distract from the itching -- the same concept as hitting your hand intentionally with a hammer to distract a toothache.

Don’t Scratch that Itch

The urge to itch usually lasts for several days. Scratching chigger bites can break your skin and lead to irritation or an infection. Sharing my malaise with friends, I solicited their advice. Invariably, someone told me to put nail polish on the welts to kill the chiggers.

Now, nail polish does seem to seal the welt, and if you’ve already scratched through the skin, the initial sting of the acetone or some other ingredient in the polish may be curiously satisfying. By the time the welts appear, though, there are no critters in or on your skin to kill or suffocate with nail polish.

One friend suggested I move further south; others advised moving north. One sagely suggested I do not walk naked in the woods. I’ll take both under advisement, although I don’t think the states further south have it any better in terms of fewer chiggers.

Among other direct application treatments suggested were apple cider vinegar, a baking soda paste, Listerine, and Witch Hazel. One unique suggested solution involved taking a partially filled jar of Vicks VapoRub and adding a couple of tablespoons of table salt to it. You stir it up and then apply a small dab to each bite. Supposedly, the Vicks holds the salt granules over the bite. Do this for a couple of days and it kills the chigger while the menthol alleviates the itching. But, again, there is no chigger to kill.

No, the best you can probably do is use a product like “Chiggerex,” something that uses benzocaine, a topical anesthetic, to calm things down, along with aloe vera, camphor, chamomile extract, menthol and other inactive ingredients. If I get them again, I’ll use this stuff along with a gel or cream that has Benadryl or hydrocortisone.

The optimal solution is to avoid them all together. If you’re going to be plowing through high grasses and brush, treat your clothes with permethrin, something that will also deter ticks. Spray your exposed areas, especially where chiggers might transition from your clothes to your skin, with something containing DEET.

Dogs get into a lot of areas loaded with ticks and chiggers

When you get home, get any clothes that may have been in chiggerville into a hot wash, then step into a hot shower yourself, scrubbing your skin with soap and water. If you’ve been out hunting or other in thick cover with a dog, keep in mind that chiggers could be on the dog, especially biting places where fur isn’t thick. Watch out sitting next to or on furniture with any dog that has been in chigger and tick habitat. Scratching a lot a day or so later could mean your dog has chigger bites. Call your veterinarian, as needed for advice on how to help your pet.

Back to the Message: Despite persistent home remedy anecdotes, the medical consensus is that applying nail polish to visible chigger bites is ineffective and potentially harmful. The welts appear and the intense itching typically begins hours after the chigger has already detached and fallen off.

Myth 2: Opossums are our friend because they eat thousands of ticks

A pervasive meme posted on social media in recent years assert that cute, cuddly opossums, those native marsupials with the beady eyes, sharp teeth, large naked ears, and long prehensile tails are something of a savior species when it comes to eradicating disease-spreading ticks.

This myth began spreading a few years ago, picked up and shared by every animal rights Loonie group and misinformed bunny hugger on social media. One of the most recent resurrections of this myth was included on an August 2025 post on the Facebook page of National Geographic. It read, “Hi, I’m a possum, and I’m not here to cause trouble. In fact, I help you more than you might realize. Every night, I can eat up to 2,000 ticks, along with other insects that spread dangerous diseases. I also help keep snake populations in check, even the venomous ones. My body is built tough... I can survive dozens of rattlesnake or coral snake bites, and yes, I even eat venomous snakes like they’re just another snack.”

The claims are fantastical, stating that “opossums act like little vacuum cleaners when it comes to ticks – with a single opossum “family” hoovering up and killing an estimated 70,000 ticks in a season.” The message, as promoted on countless sites, is protecting opossums helps save humans from Lyme Disease and other tick-borne ailments. “The actual spread of Lyme disease, or the rate at which it gets spread, can be diminished thanks to the hard work and voracious appetites of opossums,” according to www.wideopenspaces.com.

Wow, that is some grandiose tick control! But is it true? I researched this for Field & Stream in early 2022. As we reported, it is a wholesale myth.

According to Dr. Bret Collier, former associate professor of wildlife ecology at Louisiana State University’s School of Renewable Natural Resources, “No, not at all, period. Ticks are not, in any manner, selected for by Virginia opossums.”

Myth’s Origin

The assertions related to the tick-destroying powers of opossums mostly trace back to an August 2009 published study in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B journal, called “The Royal Society’s flagship biological research journal.”

In that study, researchers in New York placed six captured species of small mammals and birds (white-footed mice, chipmunks, gray squirrels, opossums, catbirds and veeries) into cages and then “inoculated” them on their heads and necks with 100 larval ticks. For the next 4 days – the amount of time deemed sufficient in the study for a tick to gorge and drop off a host - they counted the number of ticks that fell from the cages into a collection pan. Any ticks not accounted for directly were assumed to have been consumed or destroyed as the animals groomed themselves.

Squirrels and the half-dozen opossums in the study seemed to rid themselves of the most ticks, allegedly killing 83–96.5% of the ticks, with the opossums on the higher end of the scale. This was extrapolated out to the notion that opossums can vacuum up to 5,500 ticks each season, making them an “ecological trap” for ticks and a “net reducer” of the parasites.

The Rebuttal

This 2009 study looked solely at captive opossums. A newer study titled “Are Virginia Opossums really ecological traps for ticks? Ground truthing laboratory operations,” published in September 2021 in “Tick and Tick Borne Diseases,” shows that opossums are not eating ticks in the wild.

The 2021 peer-reviewed study by Dr. Cecilia Hennessy of Eureka College’s Division of Science and Mathematics and Kaitlyn Hild analyzed stomach contents of 32 Virginia opossums from central Illinois. They used a dissecting microscope to painstakingly look for ticks or tick body parts in the opossum stomachs. They found absolutely no evidence of ticks, concluding that ticks are not a preferred diet item for opossums.

“In fact,” Collier adds, “The paper reviewed all the science (23 papers in all) on opossum foraging/stomach contents/scat and found no - that is 0%, none - evidence of ticks in any stomachs. So, I think we can, and should, put this meme and idea to rest.”

So, where did the ticks go in the 2009 study?

Hennessy and Hild point out that the 2009 researchers assumed animal grooming behavior must have occurred in the lab because the larval ticks were not collected in the cage set-up. They questioned, though, whether the 4 days was a long enough time for the larval ticks to feed and drop off, noting that things such as the room’s temperature and the animals’ body temperature can affect the length of feeding. Some laboratory studies showed feeding can last up to 10 days.

According to Hennessey and Hild, the 2009 researchers didn’t check the opossums for ticks before releasing them from captivity, having assumed that any tick still alive would have fed and dropped to the holding tray beneath the animals. “It is possible that ticks could have still been embedded and feeding on the opossums upon release,” reads the report.

The 2021 study report takes a jab at memes and myths that go viral and are later debunked, noting they “undermine the public trust in experts and evidence-based science.”

The researchers found ample evidence of people trying to attract opossums to their yards to serve as tick traps, declaring this is a bad idea that increases exposure to zoonotic diseases the animals can carry. For example, opossums can transmit Equine Protozoal Myeloencephalitis (EPM) to horses. This disease is caused by a protozoal parasite whose eggs are shed in opossum feces. Opossums are also nest predators of ground-nesting birds such as quail and wild turkeys. Up to 70% of the bobwhite quail nests are depredated by opossums, according to some reports. And because opossums often live in tick habitat, they collect a lot of ticks on their bodies – ticks that feed and then drop off to add more ticks to the world.

This misleading tick claims of this advocacy campaign for opossums is debunked.