African Dwarf Sawshark

• Maximum length62 cm (2 ft), snout included; sexes similar
• WeightNot recorded; well under 1 kg
• LifespanUnknown; other sawsharks live 9–15 years
• Depth range286–500 m (940–1,640 ft) on the upper slope
• DietShrimps and other small crustaceans, probably small fish
• IUCN statusLeast Concern (assessed 2019)

How to recognise an African dwarf sawshark

A sawshark is unmistakable as a group: a slim, flattened shark with a long, blade-like snout edged with alternating large and small teeth, and a pair of fleshy barbels hanging from the underside of that snout like a moustache. The difficulty is telling the species apart, because the differences are subtle.

The African dwarf sawshark is, first, small: adults of both sexes top out at about 62 cm, saw included, where the sixgill and longnose sawsharks pass a metre. Second, it has five gill slits on each side, which separates it at once from the sixgill sawshark that shares its waters. Third, the rostrum is marked: a dark stripe runs down its midline and another along each edge, and in preserved fish those stripes are the quickest field mark. The barbels sit roughly halfway between the tip of the saw and the mouth, and the saw itself makes up close to a third of the animal's length.

The body is a warm brown above and white below. The pectoral and both dorsal fins have darker leading edges and paler trailing edges, most obvious in juveniles, and the first dorsal fin is broad and triangular, its free rear tip reaching back past the middle of the pelvic-fin bases. There is no anal fin, a feature all sawsharks share with the dogfishes. A sawfish, by contrast, is a ray: gills underneath, no barbels, many times the size.

How big do African dwarf sawsharks get?

The name is accurate. The type series described in 2011 by David Ebert and Gregor Cailliet of the Pacific Shark Research Center consisted of a few specimens from Mozambique, and the largest mature male measured 61.6 cm and the largest mature female 62.1 cm in total length, saw included. That makes it one of the smallest sawsharks known, roughly half the length of the longnose sawshark of southern Australia; subtract the rostrum and the body proper is about 40 cm.

No specimen has been weighed and published, but a slim shark of this length weighs well under a kilogram; a few hundred grams is a fair guess. There is no evidence of the sexual size difference seen in many sharks: the largest male and female were within half a centimetre of each other. Size at birth is unknown, since no newborn or pregnant female has been examined; in the longnose sawshark pups are born at 27 to 37 cm, and a dwarf species would be expected to produce proportionally smaller young of perhaps 15 to 20 cm. Males in the type series were mature at about 55 cm. The size bar below sets the 62 cm maximum against a 1.8 m diver: this is a shark you could hold in two hands.

Where African dwarf sawsharks live

Every confirmed specimen comes from the western Indian Ocean off Mozambique, in the Mozambique Channel between the African mainland and Madagascar. The holotype was trawled at 490 m, and the known depth range of the species is 286 to 500 m (940–1,640 ft): the upper continental slope, below the shelf edge but well above the abyssal plain. Records from off Kenya and Somalia have been mentioned in the literature but never confirmed with a specimen in hand, and given how easily sawshark species are confused they should be treated as possible rather than proven. The species may well extend further along the East African slope, since almost nobody fishes or surveys that depth on that coast.

The habitat is soft sediment: mud and muddy sand on a gently sloping seabed, where the saw and the barbels can be used to feel for buried prey. At 300 to 500 m off Mozambique the water is dark, cool, roughly 8 to 12 °C, and still, a world away from the warm reefs a few tens of kilometres inshore. The sixgill sawshark, the region's other species, lives on the same slope from South Africa to Mozambique, so the two probably overlap. Nothing is known about seasonal movement.

What African dwarf sawsharks eat and how they hunt

The few stomachs opened have contained small shrimps, which is what the anatomy predicts. The mouth is small and set well back beneath the saw, the teeth inside it are tiny and pointed, and the whole feeding apparatus is designed for small, soft-bodied prey found on or in the sediment: shrimps, other crustaceans, worms and small bottom fish such as lanternfish that settle on the mud by day. With so few specimens, crustaceans dominate and that is as far as the evidence goes.

How sawsharks hunt is better known from the Australian species, and there is no reason to think the African dwarf differs. The shark cruises slowly just above the bottom trailing its barbels through the sediment; they are packed with taste and touch receptors, and the underside of the saw carries a dense field of ampullae of Lorenzini, so the animal reads the mud both chemically and electrically as it passes. When it detects a shrimp it sweeps the saw sideways to dislodge, stun or impale the prey, then drops its mouth over it. Video of captive sawsharks shows both rapid slashes at free-swimming prey and gentler raking through the sand for buried animals.

The old idea that sawsharks charge through schools of fish, slashing, and then return to eat the casualties comes from sawfish, and even for them it is exaggerated. A 60 cm shark of the deep mud is a stalker of shrimps, not a swordsman.

Behaviour and senses

Nobody has watched a living African dwarf sawshark, so what follows is what its anatomy and its relatives allow us to say. It is a bottom-dwelling, slow-swimming shark with a body flattened enough to rest on the sediment and a tail with a long upper lobe and almost no lower one, the design of a fish that cruises rather than sprints. Sawsharks spend much of their time lying still on the seabed and move in short, low glides, which suits a hunter of buried prey that would rather not be noticed by the larger sharks of the slope.

The senses are concentrated in the saw. Besides the electroreceptors and the barbels, the snout carries a lateral-line system along its length, so the animal can feel water movement from a shrimp shifting in the mud beside it. The eyes are relatively large, as in most upper-slope sharks, and above them sit prominent spiracles, openings that let a shark draw water over its gills while its mouth is pressed to the bottom.

Australian sawsharks are found in loose aggregations and sometimes in single-sex groups, and trawls occasionally bring up several at once, so some degree of sociality is possible here too. The saw is a feeding and defensive organ rather than a weapon for rivals; in the womb the rostral teeth are folded flat and sheathed so that pups cannot injure their mother, a detail confirmed in the longnose sawshark and presumed for the whole family.

Reproduction and lifespan

No pregnant African dwarf sawshark has been described, so its reproduction is assumed from the family. Every sawshark studied is ovoviviparous, or more precisely yolk-sac viviparous: the eggs hatch inside the mother and the embryos live on their yolk until they are born as fully formed miniatures, with no placenta. Litters in the longnose sawshark are 3 to 22 pups after a gestation of about 12 months, with females breeding every second year; the Japanese sawshark carries about a dozen. A dwarf species with a 40 cm body cannot hold many embryos, so a litter of a few to perhaps ten would be the expectation.

Nurseries are unknown. In the Australian species pups are born in shallower water than the adults occupy and move deeper as they grow; if the same holds here, juveniles may live at the top of the depth range or on the outer shelf, which would explain why the trawls that found adults have not found newborns. Males in the type series were mature at about 55 cm, close to the maximum size, which suggests that growth slows sharply at maturity.

Age has never been estimated for this species. Vertebral ageing of the longnose sawshark gives a lifespan of around 15 years and maturity at 2 to 5 years, and the smaller Japanese sawshark reaches at least 9. Something in that range, with maturity at a few years, is the working assumption for the African dwarf until someone sections its vertebrae (compare how long sharks live).

Are African dwarf sawsharks dangerous to people?

No, and it would be hard to design a shark less able to hurt anyone. The SharkSider database has no incident attributed to any sawshark, let alone this one, and the species lives at 286 to 500 m, several hundred metres below the deepest recreational dive. The only people who ever touch a live African dwarf sawshark are the crews of deep-water trawlers off Mozambique and the scientists who sort their catch.

Handling one on deck is the single situation in which it can cause an injury: the rostral teeth are sharp, and a struggling sawshark swung sideways can lay open a hand. Fishers who know the animal hold it behind the head and keep fingers clear of the saw, and the wound, when it happens, is a scratch rather than a bite. The mouth is too small and the teeth too fine to break skin in any meaningful way. Compared with the hazards of the same fishery, the spines of rattails and the cold, the sawshark barely registers; if you want to read about sharks that do bite, our guide to shark encounters covers the species that matter.

The SharkSider database has no incident attributed to this species. The database draws on the International Shark Attack File, the Global Shark Attack File and verified local reports, and is updated weekly.

Conservation status

The IUCN Red List assessed Pristiophorus nancyae as Least Concern in 2019. That verdict rests on two facts: its range on the East African slope is largely beyond the reach of the region's fisheries, and no decline has been detected, though with so few records none could be. The assessment is a statement of low measured threat, not of a large, well-monitored population.

The one pressure that matters is the deep-water crustacean trawl fishery off Mozambique, which drags the same muddy slope at 200 to 700 m for deep-sea prawns and langoustines and catches sawsharks as bycatch. Sawsharks have no commercial value there, but a 60 cm shark does not survive a trawl haul, and a species with small litters and a restricted range can be thinned by even modest effort. Petroleum exploration in the Mozambique Channel and the possibility of expanded deep trawling are the future concerns.

No country protects the species specifically, it is not listed by CITES or the Convention on Migratory Species, and no fishery records it separately. The practical conservation measure is knowledge: observer programmes that identify sawsharks to species in the trawl catch, and surveys of the East African slope that would show whether the Kenya and Somalia records are real. Many of the world's sharks are, like this one, discovered before they are understood (see how the Red List works).

Similar species and close relatives

The sawshark family holds about ten species in two genera, and the African dwarf is one of the least known. Its only neighbour is the sixgill sawshark (Pliotrema warreni) of South Africa and Mozambique, a larger fish of up to 1.4 m with six gill slits instead of five and barbels set closer to the mouth; the two share the same slope and are separated by counting gills. Two further Pliotrema species were described from Madagascar and Zanzibar in 2020, a sign of how much of this family remains to be sorted out.

Within Pristiophorus the closest match in size and build is the Bahamas sawshark of the deep Caribbean, another dwarf of the upper slope. The longnose and shortnose sawsharks of southern Australia are larger, better studied and the source of most of what we assume about sawshark biology; the Japanese sawshark of the north-west Pacific and the tropical sawshark of Queensland complete the better-known members of the genus. All are harmless, all live on soft bottoms, and all are told apart mainly by size, barbel position and gill count.

For where sawsharks sit among the eight orders of sharks, they are a small order of their own, Pristiophoriformes, closest to the dogfishes and angel sharks.

• Sixgill Sawsharkspecies profile
• Bahamas Sawsharkspecies profile
• Longnose Sawsharkspecies profile
• Shortnose Sawsharkspecies profile
• Japanese Sawsharkspecies profile
• Tropical Sawsharkspecies profile

Written and reviewed by

SharkSider Editorial Team

A small team focused on researching sharks and making marine biology easy to understand. Every page is reviewed against current species records and the SharkSider attack database, and updated when new incidents or research appear.

Published October 6, 2022 · Last updated September 22, 2026 · No incident attributed to this species in the SharkSider attack database, which is updated weekly.