Did you find any convincing linguistic or etymological source for nusse? I can find a lot of near-verbatim articles repeating it, including the NatGeo article you've linked, but nothing independent and scholarly about the word.

[–] razorcandy@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Yeah, I failed to see the connection to cats too. Another article says nusse is a general name for large fish such as sharks. Link

There is also a different kind of shark called a catshark but they don’t look at all like nurse sharks.

[–] egrets@lemmy.world 2 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

Ok, now we're cooking with gas! They cite The Sharks of North America (Castro, 2011) which says:

The name "nurse" comes from "nusse," meaning fish, which appears in print as early as 1440 in the Promptorium Parvulorum, an early English/Latin dictionary. [...] "Nuses were there so plentie, that they would scarcely suffer any other fish to come neere the hookes" (Hakluyt 1589).

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, "nusse" is derived from the earlier "huss," the ancient name for the catsharks

The Promptorium Parvulorum has an entry for husk:

Husk of fyshe: Squamus, -i; Masc.,

with a note against that entry:

'Huske, fyshe,' Harl, some kind of fish.

'Hush, the Lump, a fish,' JAMIESON.

'Husse, a fysshe : rousette,' PALSGRAVE.

'Huss, the dogfish,' HALLIWELL.

So we have to trust the OED about the transformation from huss to nuss. I guess it could be the classic misdivision/rebracketing ("an huss" becoming "a nuss") that gives us "nickname" and "newt".