Japanese spurdog

The shark or ray

Males measure 50 to 70 cm (19.7 to 27.6 in) long in adulthood, while females measure 56 to 80 cm (22 to 31.5 in) long. Females are also higher in weight than males.

Range and habitat

The Japanese spurdog is found in the Pacific Ocean, in southeast Japan, China, North Korea, South Korea, and Taiwan. It is a demersal species, found on the continental shelf and upper slope at depths of 52 to 400 m (170.6 to 1312 ft). It is found in the western Pacific Ocean – southeastern Japan and the East China Sea, among them the Republic of Korea, the Philippines, and the Arafura Sea.

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

It is caught as bycatch in commercial fishing, that has caused populations to decline. The Japanese spurdog is listed on the IUCN Red List as Endangered. Populations in Japan have been stable since 1983, but shark abundance elsewhere in its range has been in decline since the middle of the twentieth century.

Its major threat is commercial fishing. Even though not a commercial product itself, it is caught as bycatch in demersal fishing and used for meat or fish meal.

Japanese spurdog 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 Japanese spurdog, Wikidata item Q994619. 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.