WildEarth Guardians

Tuesday, April 21, 2009
Group Presses Feds to Protect Prehistoric Largetooth Sawfish

100 Million Year Old Species on the Decline
Contact: WildEarth Guardians

DENVER - WildEarth Guardians filed a petition today requesting U.S. Secretary of Commerce Gary Locke add the largetooth sawfish to the list of species protected under the Endangered Species Act. 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 several continents. This fish faces threats from fishing, habitat loss, a lack of legal protections, and other factors.

“Sawfish survived the age of dinosaurs and the asteroid strike that wiped the dinosaurs out, but they might not survive the age of industrial fishing,” said Nicole Rosmarino, Wildlife Program Director for WildEarth Guardians.

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.

While it is currently unprotected by the United States’ Endangered Species Act, the largetooth sawfish is listed as “critically endangered” and “declining” by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, the world’s leading scientific organization for evaluating the status of thousands of species.

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 America. 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.

This species has likely vanished from much of its range along the eastern Atlantic coastal areas of parts of Europe and much of West Africa.

Stated Rosmarino, “Obama promised to restore scientific integrity to the federal endangered species program. The science clearly shows the largetooth sawfish is headed for extinction, and we therefore urge this administration to protect this prehistoric behemoth promptly.”

WildEarth Guardians protects and restores the wildlife, wild places and wild rivers of the American West. Today’s petition is part of the group’s broader campaign to restore the Rio Grande from its headwaters to its mouth at the Gulf of Mexico.

View largetooth sawfish petition.