Nebrius ferrugineus – The words shark!

My research on the nurse shark was firework of interesting facts, or rather words. Language at its best. We also have a good portion of history again on picmybug.

First of all, there are at least five different species of sharks that are called nurse shark. We will be talking about the Tawny nurse shark.

‘The’ Nurse shark Ginglymostoma cirratum lives near the American continent, and the west coast of Africa. You can’t find it in the Indo Pacific.

The Gray nurse shark, or Sand tiger shark (Carcharias taurus) has a wide distribution range, and a very different appearance from our shark.

In 2015 the Pacific nurse shark, G. umami was described. Before it was thought to be G. cirratum. It’s the same story as with the mantas and eagle rays. Isn’t it interesting how different species developed in different regions. Atlantic and Pacific are connected via the Drake passage south of the Cape Horn, but still the species stay separated.

The Short-tail nurse shark (Pseudoginglymostoma brevicaudatum) can only be found in the western part of the Indian ocean.

In the Maldives you frequently see the Tawny Nurse shark. They can reach an impressive size of up to 3m. Usually Tawny nurse sharks rest in caves, or under large rocks during the day. In Vaavu Atoll, Maldives, it is a common attraction to feed those sharks in front of snorklers. That’s where the photos are from.

Nebrius ferrugineus has following classification: class Chondrichthyes (cartilaginous fish), subclass Elasmobranchii (sharks and rays), order Orectolobiformes (carpet sharks), family Ginglymostomatidae (nurse sharks). Other families of carpet sharks are for example zebra sharks, and the whale shark.

So there are a lot of different nurse sharks in the oceans, but why is the name nurse so common? It is rather unclear, we have to dig deep into language here… Several possible explanations can be found: 

1 The way nurse sharks suck prey from the sandy bottom of the ocean could be interpreted as nursing, like breastfeeding. I want to call this a modern interpretation, because I doubt that humans watched nurse sharks feeding too long ago. But I could be wrong, glass is made for thousands of years, maybe there was a method to look down from the surface? Later I’ll come back to nursing…

2 Different sources say cat sharks (family Scyliorhinidae) have been called ‘nusse’ in the past. They also sit often on the ground, but are much smaller than our shark. So there could have been a mix up, or just a generalization of similar looking ‘nusse’ sharks. 

But, I couldn’t find a single confirmation of the use of ‘nusse’. The flesh of the spiny dogfish (Squalus acanthias, a cat shark 🙂 ) is called ‘huss’, but I couldn’t find out why. ‘Hus’ is an old word for house, ‘hussy’ was a word for housewife, and this might be the origin of the word ‘nusse’, which means nothing else but nurse. The Oxford English Dictionary’s earliest evidence for the word nurse is from 1499, it appeared in ‘Promptorium Parvulorum’.  

3 ‘Hurse’, also an old english word, meaning ‘sea floor shark’. Again I wasn’t able to find prove for that. This word drove me nuts. It got always auto-changed to ‘hearse’. Funeral car. OED says it’s a variation of ‘huss’, the flesh of the dog fish. 

Nusse, huss, hus, hurse, it all comes back to nursing, a shark that is either feeding from the sea bed, or people are feeding on the shark (dog fish), or the woman that might nurse you on your death bed? I could imagine that in the early days people were commonly buried at sea, where the nusse (cat sharks) would nurse on them? But then would you eat the huss still?

I want to throw a 4th theory in the ring. Norse shark. Nordic. Again the dog fish is a Nordic species, and has been and still is a source of food. 

5 http://www.elasmo-research.org/education/topics/ng_nurse_name.htm offers the 5th theory and an interesting thought on the topic. When someone observed a shark giving birth to living young, they may have assumed it would nurse the little ones. The linked article also gives an indication when people started using the modern name nurse shark. It might have started in the 16th century, when Europeans explored the world, and naturally compared the local fauna to what they know from their home countries. Cat sharks. Dogfish. From the north.

What’s your favourite explanation?

Common names are always confusing and often regional. Nebrius ferrugineus is easier to understand. It means something like rust-colored (ferrugineus), with the skin of a fawn (Nebrius). I guess it would rather point out the fur/ coat of a fawn?! 

Meta AI describes the texture of a fawns coat as follows:

‘The coat is soft, thick, and velvety, with a subtle sheen.’ I guess mostly the velvety sheen and brown color refers to a nurse shark? Or is it about the nursing again? Like being in the coat of a fawn, because they got nursed? Theory no. 6 for the background of nurse!

Tawny is an old word for rust-colored, which is brown. It origins from tan, tanbark, which could be oak or any other tannin rich material. Why don’t we call it the brown velvet shark!? Lots of old, forgotten words my dear shark!

Then there’s a bunch of other common names for nurse sharks that made me rise an eyebrow. They seem to be very regional. For example there is Sleepy shark, Spitting shark, and Madame X, which is probably the most mysterious common name for the Tawny nurse shark. It origin is the Australian fisherman Norman Ward Caldwel Grant, mentioned in: Last, P.R. and J.D. Stevens, 1994. Sharks and rays of Australia. CSIRO, Australia. 513 p. I wasn’t able to get access to that book. I can’t say where Madame x is coming from. I’m sure it’s a great story! I can only assume.

Grant wrote ‘Fangs of the sea : peril and adventure in shark fishing for a living’ in 1939, and ‘Titans of the Barrier Reef : further adventures of a shark fisherman’ in 1936. I mean he wrote books, so he might have read books as well. A quick search on literature from before 1936 gave me this: There’s a Madame X in Alexandre Bisson’s ‘La Femme X’ from 1908. The role play could be interpreted as a story about a mother who does not nurse her son. A story about cheating and divorce and custody. Did Grant read the story, and also found out that the nurse shark doesn’t nurse its pups after birth?

A funny coincidence: Bisson was born in the Normandy, which name comes from the norse men. Norse shark.

Norse, nusse, hus, huss, nursing but not nursing shark, who is tanned, and shiny as a fawn, you taught me many words!