Critically Endangered
Smalltooth sawfish
Pristis pectinata
Smalltooth sawfish is a shark or ray in the family Pristidae (order Rhinopristiformes) — Pristis pectinata, recorded as Critically Endangered.
Appearance
Its upperparts are brownish-gray, gray, bluish-gray or blackish, and the underparts are whitish. It can be separated from the more similar dwarf sawfish (P. Clavata) and green sawfish (P. Zijsron) by the distribution (both are only found in the Indo-Pacific) and the dorsal fin (its leading edge is placed slightly or clearly behind the leading edge of the pelvic fins in the dwarf and green sawfish).
The smalltooth sawfish reputedly reaches a total length of up to 7.6 m (25 ft), but this is likely an exaggeration and the largest confirmed size is 5.54 m (18.2 ft). It weighs up to 350 kg (770 lb).
Range and habitat
The smalltooth sawfish is found in tropical and subtropical parts of the Atlantic, among them the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico. Its original range was the smallest of the sawfish species, covering about 2,100,000 km2 (810,000 mi2). In the west it once ranged from the United States to Uruguay and in the east from Senegal to Angola.
Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.
Diet and breeding
This led them to falsely assume that the sawfish, like many other marine vertebrates with a "beak," or an elongated rostrum, follow the rule that the appendage is used to either sense prey or capture prey, but never both. Recent studies have demonstrated, even so, that the sawfish utilize their rostrum to both sense and manipulate prey.
The electrosensory system is believed to be used in the courtship behavior of sawfish and other elasmobranchs. Once a mate has been selected, several copulations occur during that the male inserts his claspers, that are paired intromittent organs, into the female's vagina.
In crisis
It is a critically endangered species that has disappeared from much of its historical range. Smalltooth sawfish are extremely vulnerable to overexploitation because of their propensity for entanglement in nets, their restricted habitat, and low rate of population growth. The species is listed as critically endangered by the IUCN Red List.
The Smalltooth sawfish species is critically endangered mainly because of the fishing pressure business that feeds into the shark-fin industry. It is the only sawfish that certainly still survives in the United States (the largetooth sawfish, P. Pristis, has likely been extirpated from this country), and it has been listed by the National Marine Fisheries Service as endangered under the Endangered Species Act since 2003.
CITES lists this taxon on Appendix I. Confirm the current appendix on the CITES checklist.
Smalltooth 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 Smalltooth sawfish, Wikidata item Q311651. 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.
