Finetooth Shark

• Maximum lengthAbout 1.9 m (6.2 ft); most adults 1.3–1.6 m
• WeightUsually 8–15 kg (18–33 lb); no reliable maximum published
• LifespanAt least 14 years
• Depth rangeSurf zone to about 20 m (65 ft)
• DietMenhaden, mullet, spot, croaker, Spanish mackerel, shrimp
• IUCN statusNear Threatened (assessed 2020)

How to identify a finetooth shark

On a Gulf Coast pier the finetooth is one of half a dozen small grey requiem sharks that come over the rail, and it is the one with nothing painted on it. There are no black tips on the fins, no black smudge on the snout, no white spots on the flanks: just a dark blue-grey back, a clean white belly and a faint pale stripe running along the side. That absence of markings already rules out the blacktip and spinner shark, the blacknose and the Atlantic sharpnose, its usual companions in the surf.

Two features clinch it. The gill slits are strikingly long, roughly twice the diameter of the eye and reaching well up the side of the head, longer than in any of the look-alikes. And the teeth are tiny for a shark of its size: 12 to 15 rows on each side of the upper jaw and 13 to 14 in the lower, every one a narrow, erect or slightly angled spike with a smooth edge or, at most, a trace of fine serration near the base. The finetooth's teeth feel like a comb; there is more on tooth shapes on our page how many teeth sharks have.

The rest of the body is standard for the genus. The snout is long and pointed, the eyes fairly large with a nictitating membrane, the first dorsal fin moderately tall and starting over the rear of the pectoral fins, the second dorsal small and set over the anal fin. There is no ridge of skin between the dorsal fins, which separates the finetooth from the ridge-backed sandbar and dusky sharks.

How big do finetooth sharks get?

Not very. The largest finetooth reliably measured was about 1.9 m (6.2 ft) long, and fish over 1.7 m are rare. Most adults fall between 1.3 and 1.6 m (4.3–5.2 ft), and a 1.5 m finetooth weighs roughly 10–12 kg (22–26 lb). No trustworthy maximum weight has been published. The figure of 11.1 ft that appeared on this page before was wrong by a wide margin: no finetooth has ever approached 3 m.

Pups are born at about 50–60 cm (20–24 in) after a year in the womb. In the Gulf of Mexico males mature at about 1.2 m and four years, females at about 1.35 m and four to five years; along the Atlantic coast of the Carolinas the same lengths take a year or two longer, roughly five years for males and six for females. Females are the larger sex by 10–15 cm and account for nearly all of the biggest fish.

The size bar below sets the 1.9 m maximum against a diver: longer than a person, but light enough for one angler to lift.

Where finetooth sharks live

The finetooth is a shark of the western Atlantic, and its heartland is the coast of the south-eastern United States. It is common in summer from North Carolina down through South Carolina, Georgia and both coasts of Florida, and right across the northern Gulf of Mexico from the Florida Panhandle to Texas, where fisheries surveys in Mississippi Sound rank it among the two or three most frequently caught sharks. South of the Gulf the record is patchy: Cuba, Trinidad and the coast of Guyana, then a separate population off southern Brazil between São Paulo and Santa Catarina. Old reports from West Africa, off Senegal and Guinea-Bissau, are now thought to be misidentifications of other species.

Wherever it occurs, the finetooth stays shallow. It lives over sand and mud in less than 20 m (65 ft) of water: the surf zone, estuary mouths, coastal sounds and bays. It is a warm-water animal that arrives on the Carolina coast in late March or April once the sea passes about 20 °C and leaves again in September or October, moving south to Florida for the winter. The same seasonal pulse plays out in the northern Gulf.

Nursery grounds are the shallow, turbid sounds behind barrier islands: Bulls Bay in South Carolina, Apalachicola Bay and Crooked Island Sound in Florida, Mississippi Sound and the bays of the upper Texas coast are all documented.

What finetooth sharks eat and how they hunt

The finetooth is a fish-eater with one prey above all others: the Atlantic and Gulf menhaden, the oily, schooling herring relatives that pour along the south-eastern coast in enormous shoals every summer. Stomach studies from South Carolina and the Gulf find menhaden in most feeding sharks. Around that staple the diet includes mullet, spot, Atlantic croaker, Spanish mackerel and other small schooling fishes, penaeid shrimp, and now and then a small shark or ray. One was recorded scavenging a shark that had died in a net.

Those needle teeth explain the method. A finetooth grabs whole fish and swallows them; the narrow, smooth-edged teeth hold a slippery menhaden and are useless for anything larger. Sharks on a menhaden school have been seen biting the heads off the fish before swallowing the bodies.

Unusually for a shark, much of the hunting is done in daylight. Schools of finetooths, adults and juveniles together, push into the surf zone and around inlet mouths on a rising tide, driving menhaden and mullet into the shallows where anglers see them thrashing at the surface. At close quarters, as in every requiem shark, the ampullae of Lorenzini along the snout pick up the muscle signals of prey the eyes cannot see in the murk.

Behaviour, schooling and migration

The finetooth is one of the more social requiem sharks. It travels and feeds in schools that mix sizes and sexes, and a gillnet set across a school can come up with dozens at once. Pregnant females peel off in late spring to give birth in the sheltered sounds.

It is a quick, restless swimmer and, like the rest of its family, must keep moving to breathe. That speed is its main defence: adults are agile enough to escape shrimp trawls, and the species turns up in trawl bycatch mostly as juveniles. Its own predators are larger sharks, above all the bull shark of the same inlets and sounds.

Migration is seasonal and coastal rather than oceanic. The Atlantic population moves north in spring and south in autumn along the shelf, staying inside the 20 m line, as conventional tag returns and the timing of catches in each state show. Whether the Gulf and Atlantic sharks mix around the Florida peninsula is not settled; age studies show the two groups grow at different rates, which is why the maturity figures above differ by region.

Reproduction, growth and lifespan

Finetooth sharks are viviparous with a yolk-sac placenta. Mating takes place in May and June, and the males bite the females to hold them. For about three months the embryos live on yolk; the empty sac then fuses with the uterine wall into a placenta. Pregnancy lasts about 12 months, so birth also falls in May and June, in the same shallow sounds the adults use for feeding.

Litters are small: 1 to 6 pups, usually 2 to 6 and on average about 4, each 50–60 cm long at birth. Because a female mates soon after giving birth but then needs a year to carry the next litter, the cycle is biennial, one litter every two years. The pups spend their first summer in the nursery and leave with the adults when the water cools.

Age has been read from vertebral growth bands in both the Gulf of Mexico and the Carolinas. Growth is rapid until maturity and then slows. The oldest sharks in those studies were about 14 years old, and it is likely that a few live somewhat longer; nothing suggests a lifespan beyond 20 years. Against the figures on our page on how long sharks live, the finetooth is a short-lived, fast-maturing shark, and that is the one biological trait working in its favour under fishing pressure.

Is the finetooth shark dangerous to people?

No unprovoked attack by a finetooth shark has ever been confirmed, and the SharkSider database has no incident attributed to the species. It shares the surf with millions of bathers every summer, often within metres of a swimmer, yet the record stays empty. The reason is its size and its teeth: a 1.5 m shark with a jaw full of slender fish-holding spikes has neither the motive nor the equipment to bite a person, and finetooths driving menhaden past a swimmer's legs simply go round.

The people it does bite are the ones who catch it. A finetooth on a line or in a net thrashes and snaps at anything within reach, and anglers and gillnet crews are bitten on the hand with some regularity. Those are provoked injuries that seldom need more than stitches. A few of the unidentified "small grey shark" bites on bathers in Florida and South Carolina could in principle involve a finetooth, but the blacktip and spinner sharks that hunt the same schools are far more often to blame. Stay out of the water when bait schools are being chased, and read what to do if a shark approaches.

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 and fisheries

The IUCN Red List classes the finetooth shark as Near Threatened globally, in an assessment dated 2020. In United States waters it is one of the best-managed small sharks in the world: it belongs to the small coastal shark group of the federal Atlantic highly migratory species plan, with quotas, permits and closed areas, and a 2007 stock assessment found the population not overfished, although fishing pressure from the gillnet fleet was then too high and has since been restricted. Elsewhere in its range there is no management at all. Off Brazil, Trinidad and Guyana the species is caught in coastal gillnets and beach seines with no size limits, and the small, isolated Brazilian population is the main reason for the cautious global listing.

In the south-eastern United States the finetooth is a target, not just bycatch. Strike-net and drift-gillnet boats working off Florida, Georgia and the Carolinas set on the summer schools, and the meat is sold fresh and salted; the fins are small and worth little. Juveniles die in shrimp trawls along the Gulf coast, a pressure that has eased since bycatch-reduction devices became compulsory.

Since November 2023 the whole requiem shark family has been listed on CITES Appendix II, so any international trade in finetooth products requires export permits. The species is not covered by the Convention on Migratory Species. Its saving graces are a short generation time and fast growth, which let it absorb fishing losses that would wipe out a slower shark; read why sharks are endangered and our page on bycatch for how the odds stack up for species without that advantage.

Similar species and close relatives

The finetooth belongs to Carcharhinus, and its nearest relatives on the same coast are the other small, shallow-water members of the genus. The blacktip shark is the one most often confused with it, since both school on menhaden in the surf, but the blacktip has black-tipped fins, a stouter body, shorter gill slits and broad serrated teeth. The spinner shark is similar again, with a black-tipped anal fin and a habit of leaping and spinning out of the water when it feeds. The blacknose shark is smaller and carries a dark smudge on the tip of the snout. The smalltail shark of the Caribbean and Brazil is closest in build, slim and unmarked, but has a much shorter snout and broader teeth.

Beyond the genus, the Atlantic sharpnose shark is the other everyday catch of the south-eastern surf, a smaller shark with white spots on the flanks and long labial furrows at the corners of the mouth. The heavier bull shark and sandbar shark of the same waters are unlikely to be confused with it out of the water. The species known in the southern Caribbean as the "night shark" is a different animal altogether; the finetooth's alternative names, eventooth and smoothtooth shark, all refer to the same fine, smooth dentition. For the wider family, see our introduction to the requiem sharks.

• Spinner Sharkspecies profile
• Blacknose Sharkspecies profile
• Smalltail Sharkspecies profile
• Atlantic Sharpnose Sharkspecies profile
• Bull Sharkspecies profile
• Sandbar Sharkspecies 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 August 23, 2022 · Last updated September 22, 2026 · No incident attributed to this species in the SharkSider attack database, which is updated weekly.