Scientists tagged and released the fish, which despite its shark-like appearance, is actually a type of ray.
Another team member went back to shore to get a tagging device, since “no one had imagined they’d need” one, with sawfish being so rare in the region, per the statement. Having confirmed the identity of the massive creature, Grubbs and his students restrained the animal, which measured 13 feet long. Before Grubbs’ find, no one had tagged a sawfish in Cedar Key for three to four decades. Now, sightings of sawfish are few and far between.
By the end of the century, their population had crashed by 90 percent. Juveniles take several years to reach reproductive maturity, making it even more difficult for their numbers to recover. Hunters captured the animals and sold their toothy snouts, and sawfish became entangled in fishing nets. But throughout the 1900s, coastal development destroyed mangrove forests along Florida’s shore. Young sawfish sheltered in spindly mangrove roots. Smalltooth sawfish were common across Florida waters and could even be sighted as far as Texas or North Carolina. EIQdgkFn76- Florida Museum July 10, 2023Ī century ago, such a find would have hardly been shocking. Sawfish were the first native marine fish listed under the endangered species act, and the sighting is a sign that they're recovering. It's the furthest north a sawfish has been tagged in decades. Researchers caught and tagged a 13-ft sawfish last month. “I saw the tail before the rostrum, so I lost my calm at that point and screamed ‘Sawfish! It’s a sawfish!’” “I was pretty sure this was a sawfish, but I remained stone-faced because I didn’t want to disappoint the students if I was wrong,” Grubbs says in a statement. This eerie, boneless creature looks like a shark with a chainsaw for a nose, called a rostrum. When it snagged something large, Dean Grubbs, a marine ecologist at Florida State University who was co-teaching the class, thought they’d found a nurse shark.īut before long, the animal jerked against the fishing line, and Grubbs suspected the group was about to see something much stronger and rarer-a critically endangered smalltooth sawfish. So, last month, from a boat off the coast of Cedar Key, Florida, they cast a line.
During a field course about sharks, scientists wanted to capture a juvenile for students to examine.
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