Endangered
Leafscale gulper shark
Centrophorus squamosus
The leafscale gulper shark is a dogfish of the family Centrophoridae.
Appearance
The leafscale gulper shark has no anal fin, two dorsal fins with spines, the first dorsal being relatively low and long, large eyes, and rough leaf-like denticles. The leafscale gulper shark is a dogfish of the family Centrophoridae.
Its maximum length is 158 centimetres (5 ft 2 in).
It was the first described species in the genus Centrophorus, that now contains 13 species.
Range and habitat
Eastern Atlantic around continental slopes from Iceland south to the Cape of Good Hope, western Indian Ocean around Aldabra Islands, and western Pacific around Honshu, Japan, the Philippines, south-east Australia, and New Zealand. Also occurs pelagically in much deeper water.
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 New Zealand Department of Conservation has classified the leafscale gulper shark as "Not Threatened" with the qualifier "Secure Overseas" under the New Zealand Threat Classification System.
Leafscale gulper shark 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 Leafscale gulper shark, Wikidata item Q2165509. 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.
