No two humans process the death of a loved one the same.

What about other animals?

For instance, in the case of chimpanzees, what we see is that there is huge variability in how they react to death.

It's Thursday, October 24th, and you're listening to Science Friday.

I'm SciFry producer Shoshana Bucksbaum. Throughout human history, humans have given a lot of

thought to death. We grapple with the inevitability of mortality. We create elaborate burial rituals,

and we decide how best to mourn the loss of a loved one.

But what about other animals? How do they understand death?

Here's sci-fire producer Kathleen Davis in conversation with Dr. Susanna Monsot, author of

Playing Possum, How Animals Understand Death, an associate professor of philosophy at the National Distance Education

University in Madrid, Spain. Dr. Monso, welcome to Science Friday. Thank you so much for having me.

It's a pleasure to be here. So I want to jump right in and talk about the animal that's in the

title of your book, which is a possum, or as they're sometimes called opossums,

what's so special about possums and their relationship with death? Yeah, so the opossum is an animal

that I find really fascinating, apart from the fact that they're super cute, in my opinion.

The opossum, when she feels threatened and she feels like she can't. apart from the fact that they're super cute, in my opinion.

The opossum, when she feels threatened and she feels like she cannot escape,

she pretends that she's dead.

But she does this in an extremely elaborate way.

So she adopts the bodily and facial expression of a corpse.

Her body temperature drops.

Her breathing and heart rate are reduced.

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