282 Shark and Company 



fatal attacks on men have been reported. Dr. Francis Day, an eminent 

 authority on the fishes of India, spoke long ago of a report that a bather 

 was cut in half by the slashes of a Sawfish. A more modern eye-witness 

 account of a Sawfish attack is given by the writer A. Hyatt Verrill:^ 



. . . While on the coast of Yucatan, one of my men waded into shallow 

 water, armed with a small fish spear, in search of octopus which the natives 

 consider a great dainty. Suddenly, he uttered a howl of pain, and, floundering 

 about, jabbed downward with his weapon. A moment later, he came splashing 

 ashore, a three-foot Sawfish impaled on his spear, and the calf of his leg torn 

 and lacerated by the saw-teeth of the fish which had attacked him without the 

 least provocation. In this particular case, the wounds were not serious, for the 

 "saw" of the fish was barely eight inches in length while the teeth along its 

 edges were scarcely larger than the blade of a small scalpel . . . 



Verrill's companion was lucky. He was attacked by a mere baby, 

 for 20-foot Sawfish with wicked-looking saws 6 feet long are not rare. 

 Sawfish are reported from southeast Asia to grow to 30 feet in length, 

 with saws accounting for one fourth to one third their length. An 

 Australian species, the Green sawfish {Fristis zijsron Bleeker, 1851), is 

 known to reach a length of 24 feet and is described as dangerous when 

 cornered. A 17-foot Sawfish caught off^ the Texas coast weighed 1,300 

 pounds, and a West Indian monster of unrecorded length had an esti- 

 mated weight of 5,300 pounds. 



Speculation has been going on for centuries about the manner in 

 which the Sawfish uses its weapon. The sixteenth-century naturalist, 

 Olaus Magnus, Archbishop of Upsala in Sweden, reported that the 

 Sawfish "will swim under the ships, and cut them, that the water may 

 come in, and he may feed upon the men when the ship is drowned." 

 And the eighteenth-century English naturalist, John Lathan, told of "a 

 battle between several Sawfishes and a whale, when all of them attacking 

 the whale at once, soon became victorious." Needless to say, further 

 study was indicated! 



Not until a few years ago, however, did any scientist have an op- 

 portunity to study the Sawfish closely and extensively. The observations 

 were made by C. M. Breder, Jr., on a Sawfish (Pristis pectinatus 

 Latham, 1794) in a retaining pen at the Lerner Marine Laboratory on 

 Bimini Island in the Bahamas. The Sawfish was fed small fish or pieces 

 of larger fish. When food was placed on the bottom, the Sawfish swam 

 over it and, like a skate, picked it up with its slit-like mouth. When 

 food floated on the surface or fell down through the water, the Saw- 

 fish struck at it sidewise and impaled it on one of its saw teeth. Then it 



^ A. Hyatt Verrill, Strange Fish and Their Stories (Boston: L. C. Page & Co., 

 1948). 



