Largetooth sawfish

Appearance

Its upperparts are generally grey to yellowish-brown, often with a clear yellow tinge to the fins. Individuals in freshwater may have a reddish colour caused by blood suffusion below the skin.

The largetooth sawfish may mature to 7.5 m (25 ft) in total length, though the largest confirmed specimen was a 7 m (23 ft)-long West African individual.

Range and habitat

The largetooth sawfish can be found worldwide in tropical and subtropical coastal regions, but it also enters freshwater and has been recorded in rivers as far as 1,340 km (830 mi) from the sea. Historically, its East Atlantic range was from Mauritania to Angola. Its West Atlantic range was from Uruguay to the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico.

Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.

Diet and breeding

Breeding is seasonal in thgives birth to live young species, but the exact timing appears to vary depending on the region. The adult females can breed once every 1–2 years, the gestation period is about five months, and there are indications that mothers return to the region where they were born to give birth to their own young.

The "saw" can be used both to stir up the bottom to find prey and to slash at groups of fish.

In crisis

It has declined drastically and is now critically endangered. A range of English names have been used for the species, or populations now part of the species, among them common sawfish (despite it being far from common today), wide sawfish, freshwater sawfish, river sawfish (less frequently, other sawfish species also occur in freshwater and rivers), Leichhardt's sawfish (after explorer and naturalist Ludwig Leichhardt) and northern sawfish. As suggested by the alternative name common sawfish, it was once plentiful, but has now declined drastically leading to it being considered a critically endangered species by the IUCN.

Only Australia still has a relatively healthy population of the species and this may be the last remaining population in the entire Indo-Pacific that is of sufficient size to be viable, but even it has experienced a decline. The likely largest remaining population in this region is in the Amazon estuary, but another important population is in the San Juan River system in Central America.

CITES lists this taxon on Appendix I. Confirm the current appendix on the CITES checklist.

Largetooth sawfish 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 Largetooth sawfish, Wikidata item Q1094698. 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.