Endangered
Bonnethead
Sphyrna tiburo
The Bonnethead is the smallest member of the hammerhead shark genus Sphyrna, and part of the family Sphyrnidae.
Appearance
The body is grey-brown above and lighter on the underside.
The shark is characterized by a broad, smooth, spade-like head: it has the smallest cephalofoil (hammerhead) of all Sphyrna species.
Typically, Bonnethead sharks are about 80–90 cm (2.6–3.0 ft) long, with a maximum size of about 150 cm (4.9 ft).
Range and habitat
This species occurs on both sides of the American coast, in regions where the water is usually warmer than 70 °F (21 °C). In the Atlantic, it ranges from New England, where it is rare, to the Gulf of Mexico and Brazil, and in the Pacific it ranges from southern California to northern Peru. During the summer, it is common in the inshore waters of the Carolinas and Georgia. In spring, summer, and fall, it is found off Florida and in the Gulf of Mexico.
Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.
Diet
To accommodate the many types of animals on that it feeds, the Bonnethead shark has small, sharp teeth in the front of the mouth (for grabbing soft prey) and flat, broad molars in the back (for crushing hard-shelled prey).
In crisis
Even so, significant declines have been reported in the Caribbean Sea and Atlantic Central America and massive declines along with widespread disappearance on the Atlantic coast of South America as well as most of the shark's Pacific range, leading it to be uplifted to "Endangered" in 2020.
Bonnethead 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 Bonnethead, Wikidata item Q338891. 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.
