Spadenose Shark

• Maximum lengthAbout 1 m (3.3 ft); most adults 40–75 cm
• WeightRarely over 2–3 kg (4–7 lb); no formal maximum
• LifespanAbout 5–6 years
• Depth rangeInshore, mostly 10–13 m (33–43 ft); to about 50 m
• DietSmall fish, shrimps, crabs, cuttlefish
• IUCN statusNear Threatened (assessed 2020)

How to recognise a spadenose shark

Pick a spadenose shark out of a basket of small sharks on an Indian quay and the snout does the work. Seen from above it is a flat, broad triangle with a rounded tip, more like a garden trowel than the pointed cone of a milk shark or the slim taper of a grey sharpnose. The head is wide and strongly flattened, the eyes small and round with a nictitating membrane, and the mouth long and arched. There are 25 to 33 rows of teeth in the upper jaw and 24 to 34 in the lower, each tooth a single smooth-edged, strongly oblique blade that leans toward the corner of the mouth.

The body is slim and bronze-grey to brownish above, white below, with no spots, bars or black fin tips; the fins are at most a little duskier than the back. The pectoral fins are short and broad. The first dorsal fin is the other key mark: it sits unusually far back, its origin well behind the rear tips of the pectorals and closer to the pelvic fins than to the pectorals, and there is no ridge between the dorsals. The second dorsal is tiny, much smaller than the long anal fin beneath it, and the tail has a well-developed lower lobe, the "broad tail" of the species name laticaudus.

In the shallows of southern China, Vietnam and Indonesia an almost identical shark is now recognised as a separate species, the Pacific spadenose shark (Scoliodon macrorhynchos), split off in 2010 on the basis of snout proportions, vertebral counts and DNA. In the field the two are not reliably separable; geography is the best guide.

How big is a spadenose shark?

This is one of the smallest requiem sharks. The bulk of the catch is 40 to 60 cm long, adult females run to about 75 cm (2.5 ft), and the largest reliable measurements approach 1 m (3.3 ft). The old figure of 1.2 m repeated on many websites has never been backed by a measured specimen, and the earlier version of this page managed to convert 74 cm into "2.4 inches"; it is 2.4 feet. Weight is rarely recorded because the fish is sold by the basket, but an adult of 60 to 70 cm weighs around 1 to 2 kg and even the biggest are unlikely to pass 3 kg.

Pups are born at just 12 to 15 cm (5 to 6 in), among the smallest newborn sharks known, and grow astonishingly fast. Males mature at 24 to 36 cm and females at 33 to 35 cm, which many individuals reach within their first year and nearly all within two. Females grow larger than males, as in most requiem sharks, but the gap is a matter of a few centimetres. The size bar below sets the 1 m maximum against a 1.8 m diver; a typical spadenose would not reach the diver's knee.

Where spadenose sharks live

The spadenose shark belongs to the murky, warm, low-salinity inshore water of the northern Indian Ocean: the coasts of Pakistan, both coasts of India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Myanmar and the Andaman Sea coast of Thailand and western Malaysia, with older records from Somalia and Tanzania. East of the Malay Peninsula, from the Gulf of Thailand through Indonesia and Vietnam to southern China, Taiwan and Japan, the animal in the nets is the Pacific spadenose shark; several of the country pages listed below predate that split and still use the old name.

Within that range it is a fish of the mud. It favours shallow water of 10 to 13 m over soft bottoms off river deltas and mangrove coasts, where the water is turbid with silt and rich in shrimps and anchovies, and it is rarely taken deeper than about 50 m. It tolerates the brackish water of estuaries and has been caught in the lower reaches of large rivers, though there is no evidence that it lives in fresh water the way the Ganges shark does. The Gulf of Kutch, the Mumbai and Gujarat coasts, the Sundarbans delta and the Palk Bay between India and Sri Lanka are all places where it is among the commonest sharks landed.

What spadenose sharks eat and how they hunt

The spadenose is a small-mouthed predator of small things. Stomach samples from Indian trawl landings are dominated by anchovies, Bombay duck (Harpadon nehereus), codlets, small croakers and other soft-bodied fish of the silt-laden inshore zone, together with penaeid shrimps, small crabs and cuttlefish. The oblique, smooth-edged teeth are built to grip and hold slippery prey that is swallowed whole rather than to cut, and nothing bigger than a sardine has been found in one.

Hunting takes place in water where eyesight is close to useless. Visibility off a monsoon river mouth may be a few centimetres, and the spadenose's small eyes reflect that; it relies instead on smell, on the pressure-sensing lateral line and on the electrical sense of the ampullae of Lorenzini, which are especially dense on the broad, flat snout. The trowel shape is not decoration: a wide snout carries more electroreceptors and sweeps a wider strip of mud, and many shallow-water sharks with flattened heads, from bonnetheads to this one, use it the same way, as a detector for prey buried or hiding in the turbid water. The sharks feed in loose groups of dozens or hundreds, moving in with the tide onto shrimp grounds and river plumes, which is exactly why the trawlers and gillnets that target shrimp and anchovy take so many of them.

Behaviour and social life

Spadenose sharks are schooling animals, and the schools are big. Trawl hauls off Mumbai or Karachi routinely contain hundreds of individuals of similar size, and landings show that the sexes segregate for much of the year, with pregnant females often caught apart from males and juveniles. The aggregations follow food and season: the sharks move inshore during the calmer months and out to slightly deeper water during the south-west monsoon, when the river plumes are at their strongest and the shallows turn to soup.

Nothing about the species suggests long-distance travel. Its entire life is spent within the inshore band of a single coast, and genetic work on the genus shows that populations separated by a peninsula or a strait have drifted apart enough to become separate species. It is a poor candidate for tagging, being small, delicate and short-lived, so its home range has never been measured.

The sensory picture is that of a mud-water specialist: keen smell, a snout carpeted with electroreceptors, an acute lateral line and a modest visual system. There is no evidence of the leaping, spinning or surface feeding seen in larger requiem sharks, and no record of any interaction with divers, because no diver goes looking for sharks in 10 m of brown water off a river mouth. What the spadenose does exceptionally well, and what makes it worth a page of its own, is reproduce.

Reproduction: the most advanced placenta of any shark

Most sharks that give birth to live young either let the embryos live on a big yolk or attach a used-up yolk sac to the uterine wall late in pregnancy. The spadenose does something more extreme. Its eggs are among the smallest of any shark, around a millimetre across, so the embryo has almost no yolk to start with; within weeks of fertilisation it is plugged into a columnar placenta buried deep in the uterine lining, through which the mother supplies almost everything it becomes. Studies by Japanese and Indian embryologists calculated that the embryo increases in mass several thousand-fold between egg and birth, the greatest maternal investment measured in any viviparous shark. This is why textbooks call the spadenose the shark with the most highly developed placental viviparity.

The pace matches the machinery. Gestation lasts only five to six months, litters run from 6 to 18 pups (with 1 to 14 in some samples), the young are born at 12 to 15 cm, and pregnant females are found in every month of the year, though each female appears to breed once a year. Maturity comes at 24 to 36 cm for males and 33 to 35 cm for females, often within the first year and almost always by the second. The other side of that coin is a short life: growth-band and length-frequency studies put the lifespan at about five years for males and six for females, among the shortest known for any shark, as our page on how long sharks live shows.

Are spadenose sharks dangerous to people?

No. A spadenose shark is the size of a large trout, with a mouth built for anchovies and shrimps, and there is no record anywhere of one biting a person. Neither the SharkSider database nor the International Shark Attack File contains a single case involving one. The one shark of Indian coasts that does hurt people is the bull shark, whose river and estuary habits overlap with the spadenose's and which accounts for the incidents summarised on our shark attacks in India page.

The relationship runs the other way. Spadenose sharks are among the most heavily eaten sharks on earth: fried, curried, dried and salted along the whole Indian and Pakistani coast, sold as "mori" in Goa and "pillai sura" in Tamil Nadu, and reduced to fishmeal when the catch is too big for the market. The only injury a spadenose can inflict is a scraped hand from its sandpaper skin while it is being gutted.

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 assessed the spadenose shark as Near Threatened in 2020, with a decreasing population, on the basis of intense and largely unregulated fishing across its whole range. It is a paradox of a species: its fast growth, early maturity and big yearly litters make it one of the most resilient sharks alive, yet it is caught in such numbers by trawlers, gillnets, bag nets, fish traps and hook-and-line that landings in Indian states such as Gujarat and Maharashtra, where it was once the single most abundant shark, have fallen noticeably. Because it lives in the same shallow, muddy water as shrimp and anchovy, it is taken as much by accident as by design.

Since November 2023 the entire family Carcharhinidae, spadenose included, has been listed on CITES Appendix II, so international trade in its products now requires permits, though the fins of a 60 cm shark are of little value and most of the catch is eaten domestically. India protects a handful of large sharks under its Wildlife Protection Act, but not this one, and Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka have no species-level rules for it. It is not listed under the Convention on Migratory Species. The meat goes to the table, the offcuts to fishmeal, and the collagen-rich flesh has even been processed into a gel used as a protein supplement and a biodegradable food wrap.

The broader threat is the loss of the mangrove and delta habitats where it breeds, and the sheer fishing pressure on Indian Ocean shelves; see shark bycatch and why sharks are endangered for the wider story.

Similar species and close relatives

The spadenose's closest relative is the Pacific spadenose shark (Scoliodon macrorhynchos), recognised in 2010 and found from Indonesia to China and Japan; the two look the same and fill the same muddy niche. Beyond the genus, the sharks it is most often confused with are the other small requiem sharks of Indian Ocean shallows: the milk shark, longer-snouted and with a first dorsal fin set further forward; the grey sharpnose shark, with a narrow pointed snout and larger eyes; the sliteye shark, named for its notched eye; and the hardnose shark, which has calcified snout cartilage you can feel by pressing. On the other side of the world the Atlantic and Pacific sharpnose sharks play the same ecological role of small, fast-breeding inshore shark.

The earlier version of this page called the spadenose "a close relative of the hammerhead". That is a stretch. Molecular studies place Scoliodon near the base of the requiem sharks, and hammerheads branch from within the same broad group, so they are cousins in the way every requiem shark is; the flattened snout is a shared solution to hunting in murky water, not a sign of special kinship. See the hammerhead sharks page and our guide to the requiem sharks.

• Milk Sharkspecies profile
• Grey Sharpnose Sharkspecies profile
• Sliteye Sharkspecies profile
• Hardnose Sharkspecies profile
• Atlantic Sharpnose Sharkspecies profile
• Pacific Sharpnose 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 September 13, 2022 · Last updated September 22, 2026 · No incident attributed to this species in the SharkSider attack database, which is updated weekly.