Critically Endangered
Scoophead
Sphyrna media
Scoophead is a shark or ray in the family Sphyrnidae (order Carcharhiniformes) — Sphyrna media, recorded as Critically Endangered.
Appearance
It is distinguished from the scalloped bonnethead by its shorter snout, broadly arched mouth, and deeply concave anal fin. The first dorsal fin is moderately falchate, and the second dorsal fin is as tall as the anal fin. Its coloration is grey-brown above, light below, with no fin markings.
One of the smaller hammerheads, the Scoophead measures 150 cm long. Adult males measure 90 cm long and adult females 100–133 cm. Like other hammerheads, the Scoophead is viviparous, with the pups measuring 34 cm or less at birth.
Range and habitat
It inhabits the tropical waters of the western Atlantic Ocean, from Panama to southern Brazil, and in the eastern Pacific Ocean from the Gulf of California to Ecuador, and probably northern Peru, as well. It is found in shallow, inshore habitats. It is taken with bottom longlines, gillnets, and hook and line throughout its range.
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 Scoophead is also a common bycatch of the gillnet mackerel fishery off Trinidad.
Scoophead 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 Scoophead, Wikidata item Q1069185. 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.
