Critically Endangered
African wedgefish
Rhynchobatus luebberti
African wedgefish is a shark or ray in the family Rhinidae (order Rhinopristiformes) — Rhynchobatus luebberti, recorded as Critically Endangered.
Appearance
African wedgefish have a pale olive-brown or olive-grey color with white spots spread across their back. The edges of their fins are sometimes paler in color.
The African wedgefish has a maximum total length of about 3 m (9.8 ft), but are usually 1.5 m (4.9 ft) long.
Range and habitat
The fish is found in the warm East Atlantic in Angola, Benin, Cameroon, the Republic of the Congo, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ivory Coast, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Mauritania, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone, and Togo. Its natural habitats are shallow seas, coral reefs, estuarine waters, and coastal saline lagoons. It is the only species in its genus to occur in the East Atlantic.
Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.
Breeding
Sharks and rays grow slowly and have few young. A fishery that treats them as bycatch can empty a coastal form.
In crisis
The African wedgefish is currently critically endangered. It is threatened by habitat loss and poachers.
CITES lists this taxon on Appendix II. Confirm the current appendix on the CITES checklist.
African wedgefish is Critically Endangered on this catalog because that is the IUCN category stored on Wikidata. Confirm the official criteria and any later count on iucnredlist.org.
Sources
Written for this catalog from the English Wikipedia article on African wedgefish, Wikidata item Q2068332. Family and order context is original field-guide writing about the group, not a copied assessment of this one species. Wikipedia text is CC BY-SA. Not an IUCN assessment. Counts, when quoted, can change — confirm them on the recovery programme and on iucnredlist.org.
