Smalltooth Sawfish in the Ten Thousand Islands

What exactly is a smalltooth sawfish?

Look past the shape and the smalltooth sawfish gives itself away as something else entirely: it’s a ray, not a shark, more closely related to the stingrays cruising your prop wash than to a bull shark or blacktip. Pristis pectinata carries its gill slits on the underside of its body like any other ray — the flattened, shark-like silhouette is a case of convergent evolution, not kinship. What makes it unmistakable is the rostrum: a long, flat blade lined on both edges with rows of tooth-like denticles, sometimes close to a quarter of the animal’s total length. Historically these fish grew to 16 or 18 feet nose to tail; almost everything encountered in Southwest Florida water today is a juvenile, typically somewhere in the 3-to-10-foot range, still growing up in the nursery shallows before it moves to deeper water. The captains running trips out of Marco Island and Goodland treat any sawfish sighting the way you’d treat a bald eagle overhead — not a target, a privilege.

Why is the smalltooth sawfish endangered?

The saw that makes a sawfish so distinctive is also what nearly wiped it out. That rostrum is built to slash sideways through a school of baitfish, stunning several at once before the fish circles back to feed — but it also snags in gill nets, shrimp trawls, and any stray fishing line with brutal efficiency, and there’s no good way for a tangled sawfish to work itself free. Combine that with decades of mangrove shoreline lost to coastal development up and down Florida’s coasts, and a population that once ranged from Texas to New York had collapsed to a fraction of its historic range by the late 1990s. In 2003, the smalltooth sawfish became the first marine fish species ever protected under the U.S. Endangered Species Act. More than two decades of federal protection have helped, but the recovery is slow and the range is still a shadow of what it once was — today the core of the U.S. population holds on in the mangrove backcountry stretching from the Ten Thousand Islands down through the Everglades and the Florida Keys.

Where do sawfish still live near Marco Island?

If you’re fishing out of Marco Island or Goodland, the water most likely to hold a sawfish isn’t the open Gulf — it’s the tangle of mangrove-lined creeks, bays, and passes behind the barrier islands, the same Ten Thousand Islands backcountry our captains fish for snook, redfish, and even fly fishing every week. Juvenile sawfish use shallow red mangrove shorelines as nursery habitat, tucking along the prop roots where the water’s skinny and the current’s slow, while larger sub-adults and adults range through the deeper backcountry and out toward the Everglades boundary. This stretch of coastline, protected in large part inside the Ten Thousand Islands National Wildlife Refuge and Everglades National Park, is widely considered the last significant U.S. stronghold for the species — which is exactly why an afternoon on this water is one of the very few chances left, anywhere on Earth, to see a smalltooth sawfish outside an aquarium. That said, don’t book a trip expecting one. Sightings are genuinely rare, never guaranteed, and most guests who fish these creeks all season will never cross paths with one — which is part of what makes the ones who do so lucky. You can read more about the ecology of this backcountry, including the other rare and protected species sharing it, on our wildlife guide.

What do you do if a sawfish takes your bait?

First: don’t panic, and don’t try to land it like a normal catch. If you hook a sawfish, the goal from the first head-shake to the last is to keep the animal in the water and get it off the hook as fast and calmly as possible. Never lift a sawfish, or even its rostrum, out of the water — that saw is lined with sensitive nerve endings, and yanking it around by the nose can cause real injury. If the hook is visible and comes out with a gentle twist of the pliers, take it out. If it doesn’t come free easily, don’t force it: cut the leader as short and as close to the hook as you can safely reach, and let the fish swim off trailing a few inches of line rather than fighting it boatside. This is the same catch-and-release ethic our captains already practice with tarpon and goliath grouper on every charter — you can read the full rundown of what stays in the boat and what goes back over the side in our catch-and-release guide. With a sawfish, the standard is simply higher, because federal law backs it up: it’s illegal to target, harass, retain, or intentionally handle a smalltooth sawfish, full stop.

How do you report a sawfish encounter?

Every confirmed sawfish encounter matters to the scientists tracking this recovery, because sightings are still few enough that each one adds real data. NOAA Fisheries and the FWC ask anyone who hooks, nets, or spots a smalltooth sawfish in Florida waters to call it in to the Sawfish Hotline at 1-844-4SAWFISH (1-844-472-9347), or log the sighting through the International Sawfish Encounter Database. A photo, the approximate size, and the location — a landmark, a pass, a GPS pin — are the most useful things you can hand over. Our captains report every sawfish encounter on the water as a matter of course, the same way they’d flag a manatee or a nesting turtle track, and they’re glad to walk you through the reporting steps if it happens on your trip. Fishing the full backcountry catch list around Marco Island already means a shot at snook, redfish, tarpon, and the everyday bycatch that makes a day on this water interesting — a sawfish encounter is the rare bonus that reminds you exactly what kind of wild, unspoiled water you’re fishing.