Sawfish A Rare Sight In Tampa Bay

February 17, 2008

Release from:

As they do each weekend, Wayne Slusser and Keith "Bulldog" Thomas were shark fishing at Anna Maria City Pier last Sunday.

It was about 12:30 a.m., and an extremely strong low tide cruised under a sliver of a moon.

Slusser had rigged a 10-foot Berkeley Power Stick rod with 85-pound PowerPro, a 135-pound steel leader, an eight-ounce weight and a 14/0 circle hook that held a cut Spanish mackerel.

Just as the tide began to turn, something walloped the bait. It was easy for Slusser to reel this weighty thing in, but when it came to the pier, it bolted furiously to the bottom like an enraged grouper.

"If I let any slack in the line, it went straight back to the bottom and laid down," said Slusser, a Bradenton resident. "Getting it straight up was the big thing."

After 45 minutes, Slusser and three other men pulled up . . . something.

"I didn't know what it was at first," Slusser said.

It looked like a guitar fish. Or an angel shark. They quickly took pictures of the 10-foot behemoth and released it.

It wasn't until Slusser brought the photo to Mote Marine Laboratory in Sarasota that he found out what it was - a sawfish. Only without the saw.

Mote biologist Tonya Wiley, who heads the Sawfish Research Project, said there have only been 20 reports of sawfish in the Tampa Bay area in the 10 years Mote has studied the species. She remembers some kids by the Skyway landed one in August 2003.

Sawfish are considered endangered, and the majority of the population is in the Everglades, where 99 percent of Wiley's work takes place.

"This is very, very rare from Tampa Bay," Wiley said. "But Tampa Bay is the farthest north point we get reports from."

About a dozen or so came from around the Apollo Beach TECO power plant in upper Tampa Bay, mostly in the winter when the plant warms surrounding waters that also entice clusters of manatees.

Wiley said this was only the second sawfish reported to Mote that was missing its saw.

Historically, an integral part of the sawfish's population decline has been due to gill net fisheries or shrimp trawls. A sawfish often gets tangled in a net, and usually the saw must be removed in order for the sawfish to untangle.

Sawfish, a year-round resident in Florida, prey on various small animals, chiefly by stirring the mud with its saw. A sawfish also has been known to attack schools of fish with its saw and then eat the wounded fish.

Unfortunately, the sawfish loses its primary means of obtaining food when it loses its saw.

"They must just revert to scavenging on the bottom," Wiley said.

Indeed, this is how Slusser's sawfish sunk its small teeth into the Spanish mackerel on the bottom.

Sawfish are considered a ray and not a shark, Wiley said, because they have slits on their underside instead of their side.

One thing's for sure: This is one intriguing specimen.

"We've been researching sawfish for 10 years, and we still have a lot of questions to answer," Wiley said. "When we first started off, figuring out where to go and how to catch them was a challenge."

Slusser and other anglers who report catching any sawfish can aid in this cause, assuming they know it's a sawfish.

"Nobody on the pier knew what it was," Slusser said. "If we had seen a saw, we'd have known exactly what it was."