Helen FieldsScience Writer

Hey, another story! This one’s about a National Geographic grantee who’s studying a bunch of mongooses in a national park in Botswana who get the human version of tuberculosis. Which, it turns out, is really bad for mongooses.

When she found TB in mongooses a few years ago, it was the first time anyone had confirmed a human disease in free-ranging wildlife. This is one of those “firsts” where you have to pay attention to the adjectives. Domesticated animals and zoo animals are already known to get human diseases. (It’s still a big deal, though – made quite a splash in the epidemiology world a few years back.)

This story made me wonder about the plural of mongoose. My Webster’s New World Dictionary only gives one plural: mongooses. My Webster’s New Collegiate lists mongooses first, but also mongeese. And when the vet who actually did the research talks about them, she uses mongoose as the singular and plural. I settled on mongooses and the copy editors at National Geographic News seem to agree with me.