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Gulf Oil and Gas Activities Among the Cited Threats Denver, CO-May 6. The National Marine Fisheries Service (Service) is issuing a proposal to list the largetooth sawfish under the Endangered Species Act in tomorrow’s Federal Register. The proposal comes in response to a WildEarth Guardians’ petition filed in April 2009. The agency now has one year to determine whether to finalize the listing under the Endangered Species Act. The Service found that this sawfish has undergone severe range contractions and local extirpations throughout its range; has experienced severe population declines where it is still found, and faces multiple threats from fishing, trade, loss of habitat, and inadequate legal protections. The half-ton, fascinating species is at least 100 million years old. It has vanished throughout most of its range in the Atlantic Ocean, along the coasts of parts of Europe and much of West Africa. Its range in the U.S. includes the Gulf Coast, from Texas to Florida, an area currently facing unprecedented contamination from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. “The largetooth sawfish is one of a suite of imperiled species that will be pushed closer to the brink - or beyond it - due to the unprecedented spillage of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. Sea turtles, fish, whales, birds, and others are all expected to suffer a devastating blow from BP’s environmental disaster,” stated Nicole Rosmarino, Wildlife Program Director for WildEarth Guardians. If the Service finalizes the listing proposal for the sawfish, it would be protected from “take” (including fishing), and the Service would have to develop a recovery plan to map out the steps that must be taken to reverse its population declines. In today’s proposal, the Service declined to propose critical habitat for the sawfish. “Sawfish survived the mass extinction event that wiped out the dinosaurs, but they may not survive the current extinction crisis caused by humanity. It’s time to offer this ancient, fascinating creature all available legal safeguards from fishing and destruction of its habitat,” said Rosmarino. The largetooth sawfish (Pristis perotteti) is enormous, made even more impressive by its saw, technically a rostrum, a three or more foot projection above the sawfish’s mouth, lined with sharp saw-teeth. The largetooth sawfish can reach 21 feet long and weigh in at over 1,300 pounds. It does not mature until it is 10 years old, when females give birth to litters of live young, already 2 ? feet long. The young sawfish’s saw is covered with a sheath to protect their mother during the birthing process. Litters typically number 7-9 and are produced every other year. In the wild, sawfish might live 30 years. Because it is long-lived and reproduces slowly, the largetooth sawfish is extremely vulnerable to over-fishing. The dramatic saw, which it uses to stir its prey, such as crustaceans and invertebrates, from sandy bottoms, or to stun small schooling fish such as mullet, is so easily entangled in nets that sawfish populations have been devastated by gill-netters and trawlers. Compounding this death as “bycatch” problem, the saw is traded as a curio item internationally, and its fins are showing up in the Asian shark-fin trade. The Service recognized these factors as threats in the listing proposal. Sawfish first evolved approximately 100 million years ago and have not changed must since then. 65 million years ago, an asteroid struck offshore from Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula, and wiped out most life on earth. Ancestral sawfish, like sharks (to which they are related), survived the impact. Largetooth sawfish were once fairly common in the waters of Texas and Louisiana and all along the Gulf and Caribbean coasts of Mexico, Central America, and northern South American. At times they were reported swimming hundreds of miles up major rivers, including the Rio Grande, and at least in Lake Nicaragua were a freshwater species. Sawfish were known to Mexico’s Aztecs, who used the saws in rituals. In 1979, archeologists unearthed several sawfish saws underneath the Aztec Great Temple in Mexico City. Half a century ago, largetooth sawfish were also well known to Texas shrimp fisherman and were frequently caught along the Texas coast from Brownsville to Port Arthur. One historical report describes a single fisherman, an E.F. Reid of Galveston, catching seven largetooth sawfish in one summer. These fish ranged in weight from 500 to 1,300 pounds, and in length from 14 feet to 17 feet 4 ? inches. WildEarth Guardians protects and restores the wildlife, wild places and wild rivers of the American West. The group’s effort to obtain federal protection for the sawfish is part of its broader campaign to restore the Rio Grande from its headwaters to its mouth at the Gulf of Mexico. |
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