Endangered
Sicklefin lemon shark
Negaprion acutidens
Sicklefin lemon shark is a shark or ray in the family Carcharhinidae (order Carcharhiniformes) — Negaprion acutidens, recorded as Endangered.
Appearance
The snout is rounded or almost wedge-shaped, with small nostrils bearing triangular flaps of skin in front. The second dorsal fin, nearly equal to the first in size, is located over or slightly forward of the anal fin. No ridge is seen between the dorsal fins.
This species attains a maximum known length of 3.8 m (12 ft), though it typically does not exceed 3.1 m (10 ft).
Range and habitat
The range of the sicklefin lemon shark extends from South Africa to the Red Sea (among them Mauritius, the Seychelles, and Madagascar), continuing eastward along the coast of the Indian subcontinent to Southeast Asia, extending as far north as Taiwan and the Philippines, and as far south as New Guinea and northern Australia. This species is also found around numerous Pacific islands, among them New Caledonia, Palau, the Marshall Islands, the Solomon Islands, Fiji, Vanuatu, and French Polynesia. This species likely colonized the central Pacific by infrequently "hopping" from one island to the next.
Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.
Diet
Over 90% of the sicklefin lemon shark's diet consists of bottom- and shore-dwelling teleosts, among them herring, mullets, mackerel, silversides, needlefish, smelt-whitings, porgies, sea catfish, triggerfish, parrotfish, and porcupinefish.
In crisis
A slow-moving predator feeding mainly on bony fishes, the sicklefin lemon shark seldom travels long distances and many individuals can be found year-round at certain locations. The IUCN has assessed this species as Endangered. Its low reproductive productivity and rate of movement limits the capacity of depleted stocks to recover.
Sicklefin lemon 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 Sicklefin lemon shark, Wikidata item Q604191. 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.
