Endangered
Japanese topeshark
Hemitriakis japanica
Japanese topeshark is a houndshark in the family Triakidae, endemic to the north-west Pacific Ocean.
The shark or ray
The Japanese topeshark is a relatively small shark, reaching a maximum total length of about 120 cm. Males mature at approximately 85 cm total length and females at about 80 cm total length.
Range and habitat
The Japanese topeshark is endemic to the north-west Pacific Ocean. Within this region it occurs as an extant resident species in marine neritic habitats of the Pacific Northwest. It may also occasionally occur deeper, with some specimens reported from 315–730 m.
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 species is demersal on the continental shelf from inshore waters to a depth of about 100 m and is taken as bycatch in a variety of coastal and offshore fisheries. It has been assessed globally as Endangered under the IUCN Red List criteria A2d, based on suspected population reductions driven by intensive fishing pressure across its range and overharvesting for use in Chinese traditional medicine. Overall, the population trend is considered decreasing, and the species is suspected to have undergone a population reduction of 50–79% over the past three generation lengths (30 years).
It is taken as bycatch in mixed-species fisheries using trawls, gillnets, and longlines, and all captured individuals are retained for human consumption. Powered vessel numbers in Taiwan's EEZ increased substantially from the 1950s to the late 1980s before declining somewhat. Artisanal non-powered fleets have decreased markedly, while fishing rafts remain common.
Japanese topeshark 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 topeshark, Wikidata item Q1074461. 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.
