Critically Endangered
Sand tiger shark
Carcharias taurus
Sand tiger shark is a shark or ray in the family Odontaspididae (order Lamniformes) — Carcharias taurus, recorded as Critically Endangered.
Appearance
The head is pointy, as opposed to round, while the snout is flattened with a conical shape. The males have grey claspers with white tips located on the underside of their body. The caudal fin is elongated with a long upper lobe (i.e. Strongly heterocercal).
Adult sand tigers range from 2 m (6.6 ft) to 3.2 m (10.5 ft) in length with most specimens reaching a length of around 2.2–2.5 m and 91 kg (201 lb) to 159 kg (351 lb) in weight.
Range and habitat
Sand tiger sharks roam the epipelagic and mesopelagic regions of the ocean, sandy coastal waters, estuaries, shallow bays, and rocky or tropical reefs, at depths of up to 190 m (623 ft). The sand tiger shark can be found in the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans, and in the Adriatic Seas. In the Western Atlantic Ocean, it is found in coastal waters around from the Gulf of Maine to Florida, in the northern Gulf of Mexico, around the Bahamas and Bermuda, and from southern Brazil to northern Argentina.
Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.
Diet
The majority of prey items of sand tigers are demersal (i.e. From the sea bottom), suggesting that they hunt extensively on the sea bottom as far out as the continental shelf. Their diet consists mainly of teleosts and other elasmobranchs.
Bony fish (teleosts) form about 60% of sand tigers' food, the remaining prey being sharks, skates, other rays, lobsters, crabs and squid. In Argentina, the prey includes mostly demersal fishes, e.g. The striped weakfish (Cynoscion guatucupa) and whitemouth croaker (Micropogonias furnieri).
In crisis
Shivers (groups) have been observed to hunt large schools of fish. The sand tiger is categorized as critically endangered on the International Union for Conservation of Nature Red List. There are several factors contributing to the decline in the population of the sand tigers.
Thus, overfishing is a major contributor to the population decline. All indications show that the world population in sand tigers has been reduced significantly in size since 1980.
Sand tiger shark 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 Sand tiger shark, Wikidata item Q625161. 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.
