Plan In Place To Restore Sawfish Population

September 26, 2006

Release from: Kevin Lollar
News-press.com (Florida)

A very strange-looking fish with an unmistakable toothy snout was once so common in Southwest Florida that it was considered a pest.

But the smalltooth sawfish has fallen on hard times: Only about 5 percent of its United States population remains; it has been eliminated from most of its historical range, and it’s on the federal Endangered Species List.

NOAA Fisheries Services has created a Smalltooth Sawfish Recovery Plan, a strategy for restoring the animal to its former population levels over the next 100 years; the public is invited to comment on the plan until Oct. 23.

Capt. Harvey Hamilton, 67, who was born on Cayo Costa and grew up gill net fishing with his father in Lee County and the Everglades, remembers the fish’s better days.

“We used to catch a lot of sawfish: There were a lot of them in the Everglades, around Chokoloskee and Lostman’s River, and up around Punta Gorda in that dark water,” said Hamilton, who runs Native Charters out of Bokeelia. “They were bad. They were very dangerous. We didn’t want any part of them.

“We didn’t try to get them on board because they’d beat the heck out of the boat, so we just cut the net on both sides of the saw and let them go,” he said.

Dwindling numbers

Smalltooth sawfish, which look like sharks but are really rays, used to be a common sight from Texas to North Carolina, but they are now found with regularity only in the Caloosahatchee River and the Ten Thousand Islands.

Scientists from the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission and Mote Marine Laboratory have caught and tagged more than 100 sawfish in Southwest Florida since 1999, 35 of them in the Caloosahatchee.

“The Caloosahatchee is probably the northern extent of what is the core of the population,” said Colin Simpfendorfer, head of Mote’s sawfish program and a member of the Smalltooth Sawfish Recovery Team. “The reason is probably the proximity to the Everglades coast, where the real center of population is because it’s undisturbed and commercial fishing has been banned there since the mid-’70s.”

Commercial fishing is the primary reason for the collapse in smalltooth sawfish populations.

Nobody actually targeted sawfish, but many were caught in gill nets, and, while some fishermen turned the animals loose, live release was not the rule.

Shrimp trawls, seines and other nets, as well as recreational fishermen, also took a heavy toll on sawfish.

“In the situation with gill netting, the saw, of course, was readily caught in the nets, and, as a result, they were being caught left and right,” said recovery team member George Burgess, director of the International Shark Attack File in Gainesville. “They were messing up the nets, and the fishermen were not especially happy about that, so the routine was to cut off the saw to get the thing out of your net.

“Then, at some point, the saw became some sort of curio. If you go to bars and lounges in South Florida, it’s hard not to find a saw on the wall,” he said.

According to the recovery plan, probably less than 5 percent of the U.S. sawtooth population remains.

“They used to be all the way up the east coast — they were summer visitors to New York, and were common in North Carolina,” Burgess said. “By the 1950s, there was nothing north of southern North Carolina, and the guys in the Gulf of Mexico were gradually disappearing — there were only a few records from Texas.”

By 1985, the only sawfish left were in the Gulf south of the Big Bend.

“It was slowly disappearing from under our noses,” Burgess said. “It wasn’t something we saw coming.”

Plan for recovery

Southwest Florida’s sawfish population crash slowed after the state’s gill net ban went into effect in 1995 — the species was listed as endangered in 2003.

“Since the net ban, the population has stabilized — I’m not going to say ‘improved,’” Simpfendorfer said. “So, there is a possibility this animal will recover.”

Scientists hope the Smalltooth Sawfish Recovery Plan will bring populations back by 2106, a span of four sawfish generations.

To reach that goal, three objectives must be met.

• Interactions with humans and injury and death associated with humans must be reduced.

• Smalltooth sawfish habitat must be protected and/or restored.

• Sawfish numbers must increase substantially, and the species must return to areas from which they have disappeared.

Losing habitat

With gill net fishing no longer an issue, the biggest threat to sawfish is habitat loss — smalltooth sawfish like shallow estuaries and river mouths; juveniles need shallow water with shoreline vegetation, particularly mangroves, where they can hide from predators such as bull sharks.

“They live in areas where humans are intrusive,” Burgess said. “It comes down to the same old story: Development, development, development.

“We’ve got to find a better way to keep Florida nice for smalltooth sawfish and for those of us who came here for the living conditions. Unfortunately, we’re rapidly changing the conditions, which is bad for sawfish and humans. It’s not what we signed up for.”

Under the Endangered Species Act, development that might adversely affect an endangered species can be tightly controlled.

“There are some hoops to jump through when you’re planning developments,” Burgess said. “We’re realistic. We’re not going to stop all development because of this species. But we can’t throw our hands up in the air and say we can’t do anything.

“Hopefully, there will be a balance between continued development and understanding what we need to save these animals.”

• See the draft Smalltooth Sawfish Recovery Plan

To comment

NOAA Fisheries Service will accept comments on the plan until Oct. 23.

Email: Send to smalltoothsawfish.recoveryplan@noaa.gov. Subject line should contain Smalltooth Sawfish Recovery Plan. E-mail comments limited to five megabytes.

Mail: Send to Smalltooth Sawfish Coordinator, NOAA Fisheries Service, Southeast Regional Office, Protected Resources Division, 263 13th Ave. South, St. Petersburg, FL 33701.

Fax: (727) 824-5309

About the smalltooth sawfish

• Scientific name: Pristis pectinata

• Other common names: Common sawfish, comb shark

• Status: Endangered

• Similar species: Common sawfish (northwest Africa and the Mediterranean), largetooth sawfish (Atlantic and eastern Pacific), freshwater sawfish (Indo-West Pacific), Dwarf sawfish (tropical Australia), green sawfish (Indo-West Pacific)

• Reproduction: Female sawfish bear up to 20 live pups.

• Size: 2 feet at birth; grows to more than 20 feet.

• Diet and feeding behavior: Eats schooling fish such as mullet and herrings; slashes into school of fish with saw then eats injured fish. Studies show it can also pick out and kill a single fish with its saw. Also stirs up the bottom with its saw to find crustaceans.

• Range: In the United States, Southwest Florida. Also lives from Brazil through the Caribbean. The last confirmed record of a sawfish north of Florida was 1963 in North Carolina.

• Habitat: Shallow coastal waters — sheltered bays, river mouths, mangrove edges and seagrass beds; sometimes found in deeper coastal water.

• Decline: Smalltooth sawfish populations started dropping in the 1950s, with a rapid decline from 1950 to 1964, and today they The first sawfish outside Florida in decades was reported near the Georgia-South Carolina line in 2003.