Australia's ABC News reported on September 17 that sawfish once lived extensively in the Mediterranean and eastern Atlantic, but now the European seas have disappeared. There are a small number of sawfish in the Fitzroy River in Kimberley, South Africa, and because humans cannot effectively ban their hunting, local scientists can only protect them from the perspective of reducing natural mortality.
Sawfish are a prehistoric creature found in shallow tropical and subtropical waters, with a long, flattened body shape resembling a shark, and amazingly the long "kissing saw" on their mouths, which occupies about one-third of their body length. Adult fish can reach a maximum length of 7 meters, and the kiss saw is 2 meters long and 30 cm wide.
Sawfish use giant "saws" like rakes to sift through the sand at the bottom of the water for food. They are ruthless predators, with very sharp serrations on the kissing saws, and can cut the body of their prey in half when swung in schools of fish.
But it is precisely because of the serrations on the saws that the hunter's nets are easy to entangle them, and because of the delicious flesh, the fins can be used to make shark fins, and the sawfish are killed in large numbers.
Although females and even males can reproduce on their own, but each litter can only lay about 10 eggs, the growth rate is slow, and the juvenile fish are highly susceptible to prey on other predators, coupled with the unscrupulous hunting of humans, sawfish have long been endangered, the United States in 2003 listed sawfish as an endangered species.
Local scientists plan to install a health tracker on the dorsal fin of each sawfish to monitor their predation and physical condition, and once the sawfish are detected to have abnormalities, the scientists will take the sawfish to the breeding center for treatment until the body is healthy and then released back into the river.