Endangered
Angular roughshark
Oxynotus centrina
The angular roughshark is a rough shark of the family Oxynotidae.
Appearance
Their first dorsal spine is oriented slightly forward. The snout is flat and blunt. Just like all of the Oxynotus species, they have two relatively large dorsal fins that are sail-like, and no anal fin.
At birth, they are less than 25 cm (9.8 in) and they mature at about 50 cm (20 in). Individuals from the Mediterranean Sea usually measure less than 80 cm (2.6 ft).
Range and habitat
Angular roughshark is a bathydemersal shark typically found on the outer continental shelves and upper slopes of the eastern Atlantic, ranging from Norway to South Africa and throughout the entire Mediterranean, with additional occurrences reported off the coast of Mozambique. It prefers coralline algal and muddy bottoms at depths of 50 to 660 m (160 to 2,170 ft), primarily inhabiting areas below 100 m (330 ft), though they have been recorded at depths of up to 1,300 m (4,300 ft).
Even so, this species was absent in the northeast Atlantic in a study of deepwater longline fishing for sharks near the Canary Islands.
Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.
Habits
Being an ovoviviparous species, O. Centrina produces 10–12 pups usually between 21 and 24 cm in length.
In crisis
The species has been absent in subsequent studies in the Adriatic, suggesting a possible extinction of that species in the area. Data collected during surveys in the Balearic Sea and the Ionian Sea identified one specimen at a depth of 800 m in the western Ionian Sea, suggesting that the population of O. Centrina in the east-central Mediterranean is unknown. Angular roughshark is a minor bycatch of offshore fisheries such as trawl fleets.
Although this can have a negative impact on the species, as stated above, the species had been thought extinct in the Adriatic, decreased fishing has led to their rediscovery.
Angular roughshark is 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 Angular roughshark, Wikidata item Q1089264. 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.
