Longfin Mako Shark

• Maximum lengthAbout 4.3 m (14 ft); adults usually 2.2–2.5 m
• Weight70 kg (154 lb) is the published maximum; large females far heavier but unweighed
• LifespanUnknown; probably 25–30 years like the shortfin mako
• Depth rangeSurface to at least 220 m (720 ft), mostly 110–220 m
• DietSchooling fish and squid
• IUCN statusEndangered (assessed 2018, published 2019)

How to tell a longfin mako from a shortfin mako

The fastest way to learn the species is beside a shortfin mako on a deck. Look first at the pectoral fins: on a longfin they are as long as the head or longer, straight-edged and broad at the tip, where a shortfin's are shorter than the head and narrow to a point. Then look under the snout. A longfin's is dusky to black around the mouth and along the underside of the snout; a shortfin's is white. The eyes are noticeably larger, the snout is less sharply pointed, and the body is slimmer and more flat-sided.

The first dorsal fin is set slightly further back, beginning behind the free rear tips of the pectorals rather than over them. Colour is a very dark slate blue to almost black on the back, sharply divided from a white belly that in adults carries dusky smudges. As in every mackerel shark the tail is lunate with a strong keel on each side of the tail stalk, and the gill slits are long.

The teeth are long, narrow, smooth-edged and only slightly curved, without the little side cusps of a porbeagle, and less strongly hooked than a shortfin's. There are 12 to 13 rows on each side of the upper jaw and 11 to 13 on each side of the lower. The only non-mako that is regularly mistaken for a longfin is the blue shark, which also has long pectorals but a long snout, no tail keel and an asymmetric tail.

How big do longfin makos get?

The longfin is the larger of the two makos in length, though not in bulk. The biggest reliably measured individual was a female of about 4.3 m (14 ft) caught off Pompano Beach, Florida, in 1984, and specimens of 4 m or more have been landed in the Caribbean and the Pacific since. Most adults taken on longlines are 2.2 to 2.5 m long, and any longfin over 3 m is a large one.

Weights are the weak point in the literature. The maximum weight listed in the standard databases, 70 kg (154 lb), plainly belongs to a modest animal of about 2.5 m, and the giants have never been put on a scale under scientific supervision. A 3.5 m longfin that landed in a Japanese trawler in 2004 was reported at 350 kg, and a 4 m female would plausibly weigh 250 kg or more, but neither figure is verified.

Pups are born at 97 to 120 cm (3.2 to 3.9 ft). Males mature at about 2.45 m; females mature at a similar length or slightly longer, and reach the greatest sizes, as in the other lamnid sharks. The bar below compares the maximum recorded length with a 1.8 m diver.

Where longfin makos live

The longfin mako is circumtropical, but its records are so scattered that the map looks like a set of dots rather than a range. The best-known population is in the western Atlantic: the Gulf Stream off Florida, the Gulf of Mexico, Cuba, where the species was first described in 1966, the wider Caribbean and the coast of Brazil. In the eastern Atlantic it is taken from Portugal and the Iberian slope to Cape Verde and Ghana, with rare strays into the Mediterranean. The Indian Ocean records cluster in the Mozambique Channel. In the Pacific it is known from southern Japan, Taiwan and north-eastern Australia, from Hawaii and Micronesia, and from the eastern Pacific off Mexico and southern California.

Many older records are unreliable because fishermen and even observers logged every mako as a shortfin, so the true range is probably broader and the true abundance lower than the dots suggest.

Depth is what really separates the two makos. Longfins are caught mainly on deep-set longlines fishing 110 to 220 m (360 to 720 ft) down, in the dim upper mesopelagic zone, and rarely at the surface by day. Their large eyes point the same way. Water at those depths is 15 to 22 °C in the tropics, cooler than the surface, which suits a shark that carries the warm-muscle machinery of its family.

What longfin makos eat

Stomachs examined from Cuban and Floridian longline catches held schooling bony fish and squid, and that short list remains most of what is known. The fish are the pelagic species that occupy the same depths: small tunas, scads, mackerel-like scombrids, lanternfish and the deep-living fishes that rise toward the surface at night. The squid are the oceanic species that swordfish also feed on, which is no coincidence, since longfin makos are caught most often on gear set for swordfish.

Whether the longfin takes billfish, as the shortfin famously does, has never been confirmed, and its lighter build argues against it. The long, broad pectoral fins are lift surfaces, the design of a cruiser rather than a sprinter: they let a slender shark hold depth at slow speed with little effort. Older pages, including ours, gave the longfin a top speed of 35 mph; that figure was borrowed from the shortfin, the fastest shark known, and nothing supports it for the longfin.

What the longfin does have is the mackerel shark toolkit for hunting in poor light: big eyes, a good sense of smell, and the electrical sense of the ampullae of Lorenzini for the final approach. The slender, smooth-edged teeth are for seizing and holding slippery fish and squid, not for cutting pieces from large prey.

Behaviour, warm blood and what we do not know

Every mackerel shark is regionally warm-blooded: a heat-exchanging web of blood vessels, the rete mirabile, keeps the swimming muscles, eyes and brain warmer than the sea. The longfin has the same arrangement, and it is the reason a tropical shark can spend its days at 200 m in water far cooler than the surface. Its red swimming muscle, the tissue the system warms, is a smaller fraction of the body than a shortfin's, so the longfin is presumed to be the less athletic of the pair.

Its movements are inferred, not tracked. The species is listed as highly migratory under the UN Law of the Sea, and single individuals turning up from Portugal to Ghana or across the width of the Pacific suggest ocean-scale wandering, but no satellite track of a longfin mako has been published that shows a seasonal route. The depth data from longline catches suggest a daily rhythm, deeper by day and shallower at night, following the vertical migration of the fish and squid it eats.

Two behaviours are on record from encounters rather than studies. Longfins can leap: the shark that landed in a Japanese trawler in 2004 came out of the water on its own. And pregnant females move into coastal water to give birth, which is why the largest specimens have come from the Florida coast rather than the open ocean. Nothing is known of social behaviour, and it is safest to assume the species is solitary like the shortfin.

Reproduction and lifespan

The longfin mako is ovoviviparous with oophagy, the mackerel shark pattern. Eggs hatch inside the uterus, and the embryos then swallow the unfertilised eggs their mother keeps producing. A litter is 2 to 8 pups; two, one in each uterus, is the usual number and the origin of the species name paucus, Latin for "few". Newborns are 97 to 120 cm, about the length of a shortfin mako pup and among the largest of any shark at birth.

Gestation has not been measured. It is probably long, in the range of 15 to 18 months estimated for the shortfin, but no series of pregnant females has been examined through a year. Pregnant and near-term females have been caught close to the coast off Florida and Cuba, which points to inshore pupping grounds in the western Atlantic.

Age is a blank. No one has counted the growth bands in a longfin's vertebrae in a validated study, so maturity age and lifespan are unknown. Males mature at about 2.45 m and females at about the same length; if they grow at the rate of the shortfin, that is around 8 years for males and closer to 18 for females, with a lifespan of 25 to 30 years or more, but those are borrowed numbers (see how long sharks live). What is certain is that two pups a litter is one of the lowest outputs of any large shark.

How dangerous are longfin makos to people?

The SharkSider database holds a single incident attributed to the longfin mako, and it is not a bite. On 15 July 2004, off Susami on the Kii Peninsula of Japan, a 3.5 m longfin mako reported at 350 kg leapt into the trawler Shikishima-maru while the crew were fishing for squid; one fisherman suffered broken ribs when the shark's tail slammed into his chest. That is the entire record: one incident, no fatality, no bite on a human anywhere in the world.

The reason is simple. Longfin makos live 100 to 200 m down in the open tropical ocean, far from beaches, surfers and divers, and the only people who meet them are longline crews handling a hooked animal. A 3 or 4 m shark with a mouthful of long, sharp teeth can obviously injure someone on a deck, as the Susami incident shows. But there is no evidence that the species has ever hunted, tested or investigated a person in the water.

The shortfin mako, by contrast, has a real record of bites, mostly on anglers and spearfishers, and it is the mako that fishermen are talking about when they call the species dangerous. Our Japan attack page lists the Susami incident alongside the country's other records.

Longfin Mako Shark incidents in the SharkSider database

• Records attributed1
• Fatal0 (0%)
• Years covered2004–2004
• Since 20001 incidents, 0 fatal
• Most common activitySurfing & boards
• Most recordsJapan (1)

The six most recent records attributed to the longfin mako shark

• 15 July 2004 · Susami, Wakayama Prefecture, JapanFishing for squid aboard the trawler shikishima-maru when the shark leapt into the boat — Suffered broken ribs when the shark's tail fin slammed into his chestRecorded as: Longfin mako shark, 3.5 m [11.5'], 350-kg [772-lb] · not fatal

Records are matched on the shark named in each report (“longfin mako”, “long-fin mako”), so they include incidents where the species was reported rather than confirmed. Full records by country on the shark attacks pages.

Conservation status

The IUCN Red List reassessed the longfin mako in November 2018 (published 2019) and raised it from Vulnerable to Endangered, with a decreasing population trend, in the same review that moved the shortfin mako to Endangered. The reasoning is that the two species are caught by the same pelagic longline fleets, that the shortfin's decline is well documented from catch data, and that the longfin, with a lower reproductive rate and a habit of living exactly where deep-set swordfish gear fishes, cannot be doing better. Direct evidence for the longfin is scarce because its catches have been lumped with the shortfin for decades.

International protection followed. Both makos were listed on CITES Appendix II at the 2019 conference in Geneva, effective from November 2019, so fins and meat cannot cross a border without a permit certifying a sustainable source. The species has been on Appendix II of the Convention on Migratory Species since 2008. In the United States the longfin mako is a prohibited species in the Atlantic, meaning it must be released if caught.

The threats are bycatch on longlines set for tuna and swordfish, where the fins are valuable and the meat is sold, and the biology described above: two pups a litter and a long, unmeasured interval between them. A shark that reproduces so slowly is lost faster than any fishery can notice, which is why it appears on our list of sharks at risk.

Similar species and close relatives

The longfin's closest relative is the shortfin mako, the only other living member of Isurus; the two split a few million years ago and are similar enough that the longfin was not recognised as a separate species until 1966. The differences, longer pectorals, a dusky snout, larger eyes and a slimmer body, are all summed up on our general mako shark page. The rest of the family Lamnidae are the great white, the porbeagle and the salmon shark: all warm-muscled, all with a lunate tail and a tail keel, none with the longfin's oversized pectorals.

Beyond the family, the shark most often confused with a longfin mako is the blue shark, which shares the same longlines and has long pectoral fins and a blue back but a slender snout, a long asymmetric tail and no keel. For where the makos sit on the shark family tree, see the evolution of sharks.

• Shortfin Mako Sharkspecies profile
• The Mako Sharkspecies profile
• Great White Sharkspecies profile
• Porbeagle Shark Factsspecies profile
• Salmon Sharkspecies profile
• Blue 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 27, 2022 · Last updated September 22, 2026 · 1 incident attributed to the longfin mako shark in the SharkSider attack database (0 fatal), updated weekly.