Hello everyone and welcome, welcome. This month’s article is shorter than normal due to my life getting much busier. This trend may continue into next month, but I have big ideas for some other cool shark articles, so be on the lookout for those!
Today, we will actually be looking at a relative of the sharks. Sawfishes are cartilaginous fish, considered rays, but nonetheless fascinating and often mistaken for the similarly named saw shark.
Now, without further ado, let’s dive in! 🦈
Sawfish
There are five species of sawfishes around the world: the narrow tooth sawfish, the green sawfish, the dwarf sawfish, the smalltooth sawfish, and the largetooth sawfish. All of which are endangered. They greatly resemble the saw shark with their long, protruding snouts (scientific term: rostrum) lined with teeth-like structures. Sawfishes, however, are rays. Cartilaginous fishes, or elasmobranchs, in the suborder of Batoidea. The biggest difference between rays and sharks is the placement of their gills. Sawfish breathe through gills placed on the underside of their heads, whereas saw sharks’ gills are placed on their sides behind the eyes. Sawfish are also much larger than saw sharks. Some species can grow to be over twenty feet long (660 cm). Their sharky siblings are much smaller, only about five feet long (150 cm). The sharks like to hang out at the bottom of the ocean in deeper depths while sawfishes hug coastlines and venture into the brackish waters of rivers and can sometimes even live in lakes. The shapes of their saw-like rostrum also vary greatly between species.
The “teeth” you see on their noses that gives them that iconic shape are actually transformed dermal denticles (the scales of a shark). It can appear quite intimidating, but there is nothing for humans to fear. Sawfish are quite docile but can still cause harm when they perceive danger. They often thrash violently when it caught by fishers, waving their rostrums like a weapon. It was theorized for a long time that they use their rostrums to hunt but was only confirmed in recent times. A sawfish can use its rostrum to thwack a fish in mid-water, smack it into the sand, or even pin it down. It is so good at this that it can maneuver its prey in order to swallow it head-first. This strategy allows sawfish to avoid getting pricked by spines on its prey’s fins.
Sawfish are just as vital to the ecosystem as any other fish, but its population has been in a nose-dive decline for decades and is believed to have lost 80% of its global population in the last 60 years. Some local populations are even considered functionally extinct, such as in Sri Lankan waters. Their numbers are so low that they most likely won’t be able to recover. The population of smalltooth sawfishes in Florida waters are in peril right now. An as of yet unidentified neurotoxin (potentially a type of algae) has been spreading in the Florida Keys since last fall, affecting dozens of species and causing erratic spinning behavior as well as death. Videos of sawfish beaching themselves and thrashing in the water have been circulating in the media. Since the Florida population of smalltooth sawfishes was estimated to be between 500 and 1,000 individuals, this sudden disease could be the straw that breaks the camel’s back. Multiple institutions of marine science have been collaborating to investigate the cause of this outbreak and have ruled out most of the common culprits, such as a red tide. I and everyone who cares about this issue are hoping this is a one-off event and not something that will keep coming back. Sawfishes really can’t catch a break, it seems.
Thanks for reading this short shark article about sawfishes (yes, the plural of sawfish is sawfishes and you can do the same to just fish. It’s so fun to say). Though this month’s article took a darker turn than most, I hope I’ve done what little I could to draw attention to the critical endangerment of sawfish. If you’re interested in learning more about sawfish and how to support the ongoing conservation efforts, check out the Sawfish Conservation Society’s website! 🦈
Good Morning Aomori 
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