Not a goose: Herpestidae carnivores of three continents
Mongooses are small ground carnivores in family Herpestidae—twenty-three Herpestinae species across southern Europe, Africa, and Asia, plus eleven Mungotinae species. English borrowed Indian names for Herpestes, then folk-etymology glued on a “-goose” ending by 1698; the plural is mongooses, though mongeese appears too.
Body plan: long face and torso, rounded ears, short legs, tapering tail. Coats run brindled or grizzled; some wear bold mustelid-like stripes, dark legs, and pale ringed tails. Narrow faces hide sharp teeth suited to insects, eggs, and vertebrate prey.
Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century texts still wrote “mungoose.” The folk-etymology ending stuck harder than zoological precision, which is why English speakers picture a birdish name on a weaselish hunter.
Adults measure 24 to 58 centimetres from head to rump, not counting the tail, and weigh from 320 grams to 5 kilograms. Their pupils are narrow ovals and their claws cannot retract. Mongooses are one of at least four mammal groups that evolved venom-resistant nicotinic acetylcholine receptors, each by a separate mutation; the altered receptor stops the snake α-neurotoxin from latching on. Some species live alone, others in pairs or large groups, and DNA work on 18 species shows solitary and social mongooses form separate branches.
Charles Lucien Bonaparte coined Herpestina in 1845, treating mongooses as part of the civet family, and John Edward Gray split them into three subfamilies in 1864; genetic studies later moved one of those, the Galidiinae, to the Madagascar carnivores alongside the fossa. In ancient Mesopotamia mongooses were sacred to the god Ninkilim, linked to a magic deity invoked against snakes. Kipling's Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, from The Jungle Book of 1894, saves his family from a krait and two cobras. New Zealand bars every species except the meerkat, and the United States forbids them as pets.
Source: Mongoose
