Sawback Angelshark

• Maximum lengthAbout 1.88 m (6.2 ft); most adults 1.2–1.5 m
• WeightNo reliable maximum published; large females roughly 25–30 kg (55–65 lb)
• LifespanUnknown; no ageing study, probably 20+ years
• Depth range30–500 m (100–1,640 ft), mostly 50–200 m
• DietBottom fishes, small sharks and rays, crustaceans, cephalopods
• IUCN statusCritically Endangered (assessed 2017)

How to recognise a sawback angelshark

An angel shark looks like a ray until you check the gills: they open on the sides of the head, not underneath, and the pectoral fins are separate from the head rather than fused to it. Within that plan the sawback is the easiest of the three Mediterranean angel sharks to name, provided you feel the midline of the back. From the nape to the first dorsal fin runs a single row of large, hooked, backward-curving thorns on broad bases, with more thorns on the snout and between the eyes. Adult common (Squatina squatina) and smoothback angelsharks (S. oculata) have a smooth midline or small prickles at most, so thorns you can feel with a fingertip are diagnostic. The Latin aculeata means "prickly".

Other marks: the nasal barbels have fringed, feathery tips and the skin flap in front of each nostril is fringed too; the eye is small and the spiracle behind it large and set well back; the outer corners of the pectoral fins are angular; and the two small dorsal fins sit far back on the tail, the first behind the pelvic fin tips. The upper surface is grey to grey-brown with small dark spots, a few larger dark blotches and pale flecks, but without the paired white-ringed spots of the smoothback. The underside is white.

The teeth are small, single-cusped and needle-like in both jaws, in about ten rows, built for gripping a fish sucked in whole rather than for cutting it up.

How big does a sawback angelshark get?

The sawback is a medium-sized angel shark. The largest reliable measurement is about 1.88 m (6.2 ft), though most adults caught off Senegal, Tunisia and southern Spain have been 1.2 to 1.5 m, and one over 1.6 m is now exceptional. Claims of 2 m animals appear in older books but rest on no measured specimen.

Females grow larger than males, as in every angel shark. Off Senegal and Tunisia, where Christian Capapé and colleagues examined the only substantial series ever studied, males reached maturity at roughly 1.2 to 1.25 m and females at about 1.35 to 1.4 m. Newborns measure 30 to 35 cm (12 to 14 in) and weigh close to 300 g, a large baby for a shark of this length.

No maximum weight has been published. Angel sharks are broad but not deep-bodied, and a 1.5 m female would weigh roughly 25 to 30 kg (55 to 65 lb), a little more when carrying a full litter. On the size bar below the 1.88 m maximum just edges past a 1.8 m diver.

Where sawback angelsharks live, and where they used to

The historical range covers the whole Mediterranean Sea and the eastern Atlantic shelf from Morocco south past Mauritania, Senegal and the Gulf of Guinea to Angola; that is what the map shows. The present range is far smaller and fragmented. In the Mediterranean the species has effectively vanished from the northern shores: no recent confirmed records exist from the Balearic Islands, the Gulf of Lions, the Ligurian Sea or the northern Adriatic, and it is very rare off Italy, Greece and mainland Spain. The surviving pockets are in the south and east: the Gulf of Gabès and northern Tunisia, Libyan waters, the Sicilian Channel, the Alborán Sea, and the Levantine coast of Turkey, where İskenderun Bay still yields all three Mediterranean angel sharks now and then. Off West Africa it persists around Senegal in small numbers.

Habitat is soft sediment on the continental shelf and the top of the slope: mud, sand and shelly gravel where a flat shark can bury itself. Confirmed depths run from about 30 to 500 m, mostly 50 to 200 m; a 1,400 m figure repeated in older sources rests on no verified specimen. Bottom temperatures across the range are roughly 13 to 25 °C, and unlike the common angelshark it has never been recorded in the shallow bays that bathers use. The country pages below list every coast where it is, or recently was, recorded.

What sawback angelsharks eat and how they hunt

An angel shark does not chase anything. It settles on the bottom, flicks sediment over its back with its pectoral fins until only the eyes and spiracles show, and waits. When a fish, cuttlefish or shrimp passes within a body length of the snout, the shark throws its head upward, gapes and sucks the prey in, closing the jaws in about a tenth of a second; filmed strikes in related species are among the fastest feeding movements known in sharks. The needle teeth hold the meal while it goes down whole.

Stomachs of sawbacks examined off Senegal and Tunisia held bottom-living bony fishes above all, gurnards, flatfishes, hake and small sea breams, together with cuttlefish and squid, crabs and shrimps, and now and then a small shark or ray. The old description of a diet of "small sharks, bony fish and crustaceans" overstates the sharks, which are a minor item. A large female can swallow a fish a third of her own length.

The hunt relies on senses that work in the dark and through mud. The spiracles let a buried shark breathe without drawing sand into the gills, the lateral line and the electroreceptors of the ampullae of Lorenzini register a fish moving overhead, and the upward-facing eyes catch its silhouette. Angel sharks feed mostly at night and can go days between meals.

Behaviour, movement and adaptations

Almost everything written about angel shark behaviour comes from the common angelshark, whose Canary Islands strongholds are shallow enough for divers to watch it; the sawback lives deeper and has been seen alive by only a handful of people. The two are close relatives with the same body plan, so the outline probably holds: a nocturnal, solitary animal that spends the day buried and moves short distances at night within a small home range. Tagging of the common angelshark shows very limited dispersal, and the patchy way the sawback has vanished from the northern Mediterranean fits a species that does not recolonise fished-out ground.

The body is the adaptation. Flattening lets the shark vanish into sediment; the mottled skin matches mud and shell gravel; the thorns along the back, which are enlarged dermal denticles, make a buried shark unpleasant to grab and may anchor it in loose sand during a strike. The mouth is at the very front of the head rather than underslung, because the prey is above and ahead. The gill openings are on the sides, so the shark can lie flat on its belly without smothering them, and the big spiracles draw clean water from above.

Angel sharks swim when they must, with a stiff sculling of the tail while the pectoral "wings" stay still. A slow, cold-blooded metabolism explains both the patience of the ambush and the long gaps between meals.

Reproduction and lifespan

The sawback angelshark is ovoviviparous, or more precisely a yolk-sac live-bearer: the eggs hatch inside the mother's uterus, each embryo lives on its own yolk, and there is no placenta. Nearly all the hard data come from a 2005 study of animals landed in Senegal and Tunisia. Litters ranged from 8 to 12 pups, larger females carrying more, born at 30 to 35 cm and roughly 300 g. The embryos developed over about a year, births clustered in spring and early summer, and the state of the ovaries suggested that a female breeds every second year. Males matured at around 1.2 to 1.25 m and females at 1.35 to 1.4 m; how many years that takes is unknown.

No nursery ground has been identified. Its relatives use shallow sandy bays when very young, and the loss of such inshore habitat may have hurt the sawback even where adults were not targeted.

There is no ageing study, and the vertebral growth bands of angel sharks are hard to read. The Pacific angelshark, one of the few in the family that has been aged, lives at least 25 to 35 years and matures at around 8 to 13, and the sawback is unlikely to be faster (see how long sharks live). Late maturity, ten or so pups every two years and near-zero dispersal are the three facts that explain why it has not recovered from trawling.

Is the sawback angelshark dangerous to people?

No. The SharkSider attack database has no incident attributed to this species, and the way it lives makes one improbable: it spends the day buried in 50 to 200 m of water, far below swimmers, and it retreats from anything large that approaches. Angel sharks defend no territory and have no interest in people.

The database does hold a handful of bites credited to "angel sharks", nearly all from the Canary Islands, where waders stepped on or grabbed common angelsharks buried in shallow sand and got puncture wounds to a foot or hand, plus one captive animal that bit an aquarium diver. None was a sawback, which does not live in the Canaries or at wading depth. The lesson transfers, though: an angel shark that is trodden on, speared or netted snaps upward with the same strike it uses on fish, and its needle teeth leave a ring of small punctures, so fishermen should keep hands away from the head. That is the whole of the risk; the sharks that genuinely injure people are covered under surviving a shark encounter.

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: a shark that is nearly gone

The IUCN Red List assesses the sawback angelshark as Critically Endangered, in its 2017 global assessment and its 2016 Mediterranean regional assessment, on an estimated decline of more than 80 per cent over three generations. The cause is bottom trawling. A flat shark lying on soft sediment is exactly what a trawl is designed to collect, and the Mediterranean and West African shelves have been trawled hard since the mid-twentieth century. Angel sharks were once a nuisance in Adriatic and Tyrrhenian catches; today a landing north of Tunisia earns a scientific note. Gillnets, trammel nets and bottom longlines take the rest, and low dispersal means a depleted bay is not refilled.

Protection is patchy but improving. The sawback, with the common and smoothback angelsharks, is listed in Annex II of the Barcelona Convention's protocol on protected species, and since 2012 the General Fisheries Commission for the Mediterranean has required its members to release Annex II sharks alive; enforcement ranges from good to nonexistent. Spain listed all three species as threatened under national law in 2019. The sawback is not on any CITES appendix, because there is no meaningful trade in it. Since 2019 a regional action plan run by the Angel Shark Conservation Network with the IUCN Shark Specialist Group has concentrated on finding the last populations and working with fishers in Tunisia, Turkey and Libya to make live release happen in practice.

Nothing is being done for the West African population, still caught off Senegal and Mauritania. Read more on why sharks are endangered.

Similar species and close relatives

Three angel sharks share the Mediterranean and the north-west African shelf, and telling them apart matters because fishery records that stop at "Squatina sp." have hidden the sawback's collapse. The common angelshark (S. squatina) is the largest, to about 2.4 m, with simple unfringed barbels and a smooth adult back, and it reaches into shallow bays; the Canary Islands hold its last healthy population. The smoothback angelshark (S. oculata) is smaller, to about 1.6 m, with a smooth midline and symmetrical white spots and dark blotches at the pectoral bases. The sawback is the one with fringed barbels and a row of large thorns down the spine, and it lives deepest of the three. South of the equator the African angelshark replaces them.

The rest of the family is scattered around the world's temperate and tropical shelves and looks much alike: the Atlantic angel shark of the eastern United States, the Pacific angelshark of California, the Japanese angelshark, and the South American angular and Argentine angelsharks, most of which face the same trawl problem. Large skates buried in the same mud can be confused with it; the side gill slits, free pectoral fins and two dorsal fins on a thick shark-like tail settle it. For the family's place in shark history see the evolution of sharks.

• African Angelsharkspecies profile
• Atlantic Angel Shark (Sand Devil)species profile
• Pacific Angelsharkspecies profile
• Japanese Angelsharkspecies profile
• Angular Angelsharkspecies profile
• Argentine Angelsharkspecies 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 December 1, 2014 · Last updated September 22, 2026 · No incident attributed to this species in the SharkSider attack database, which is updated weekly.