Largetooth Sawfish

This large euryhaline elasmobranch is distinguished by its elongated, tooth-studded rostrum, used to detect and stun prey buried in sediment or swimming in schools. Largetooth Sawfish can exceed six meters in length, though most surviving individuals are smaller due to intense fishing pressure. As an apex and mesopredator, it plays a role in structuring benthic and fish communities in the coastal and estuarine systems it inhabits, feeding on fish, crustaceans, and mollusks.

Females give birth to live young after long gestation periods, and the species matures slowly, making population recovery inherently difficult.

Its range spans tropical and subtropical waters across the Atlantic, Indo-Pacific, and Indian Ocean basins, with historical or extant records from Australia, Southeast Asia, South Asia, West Africa, East Africa, and the Americas. It relies on freshwater rivers, estuaries, and wetlands as nursery habitat before moving into marine coastal and supratidal zones as adults, making it dependent on connected freshwater-to-marine corridors.

Its rostrum, valuable in trade, makes it highly susceptible to entanglement in gillnets and other fishing gear, both targeted and incidental. Habitat alteration from damming, coastal development, and logging degrades nursery grounds, while storms and flooding events further disturb critical estuarine and wetland habitats. Cumulative range contraction has eliminated the species from many rivers where it was once common.

Conservation efforts include CITES Appendix I listing restricting international trade, national legal protections in several range states, targeted rostrum trade bans, habitat protection initiatives in key nursery rivers, and ongoing population monitoring and genetic studies to identify remaining strongholds, notably in northern Australia.

Despite these measures, the species remains in a declining trajectory across most of its historic range, with populations increasingly fragmented and functionally absent from numerous countries where it once occurred, warranting its current Critically Endangered classification.