Karachi: A very rare fish recently caught by fishermen off the coast of Gwadar in Balochistan was sold for Rs26,000, World Wide Fund for Nature-Pakistan (WWF-P) officials said on Monday.

The 10-foot-long largetooth sawfish weighing around 26 kilograms was caught in the Sur Bandar area of Gwadar district.

Listed as critically endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), sawfish is also included in Appendix 1 of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), which prohibits trade in those species.

“Sawfish is closely related to sharks that have a commercial value here. Generally fishermen are sensitised and some of them have been trained in rescuing endangered animals such as turtles and dolphins. But they are not so aware of other threatened species like this one,” said WWF-P Gwadar-based official Abdul Rahim when asked why fishermen captured a critically endangered fish.

According to him, the presence of sawfish is extremely rare along the Balochistan coast and its population has declined over the last three decades.

“There was a time when sawfishes were a dominant species here but the introduction of motorised fishing vessels and nylon nets led to a decline, and now this species has almost become extinct,” he said.

Mr Rahim seemed concerned over the infrastructure development taking place in Gwadar and said the government should give due consideration to the rich biological diversity of Gwadar in its development projects as the area had earlier reported many important species, including the leatherback turtle.

WWF-P technical adviser on marine fisheries Mohammad Moazzam Khan said the recent sawfish catch was the fourth authentic recent record of this species in eight years in Pakistan.

“Sawfish is one of the rarest groups of marine animals whose population is under extreme threat of extinction all over the world.

“Three sawfish species have been reported in Pakistan: knifetooth (Anoxypristis cuspidatus), largetooth (Pristis pristis) and largecomb (Pristis zijsron),” he said.

Overfishing and habitat degradation, he said, had led to a steep decline in the sawfish population. The species was abundantly found in Pakistan before 1970 and its meat, with that of other sharks, was exported to Sri Lanka in salted dried form and fins to Hong Kong.

“However, their population collapsed by the 1980s because of a high mortality rate in fishing gears. Sawfish has a long life, slow growth, late maturity and low fecundity, making them extremely vulnerable to any changes that may reduce their population.

“Besides, sawfish rostrums (saws) can easily become entangled in fishing gears that makes them vulnerable targets for overfishing,” he said.

Recalling past catches of sawfish, he said, fishermen in Gwadar caught a 1.4-metre-long sawfish in 2009. Another catch was reported from the Khajr Creek near the mouth of the Indus in 2013 while the Karachi Fish Harbour reported it last year.

The main areas for sawfish fishing in Pakistan were Miani Hor (Sonmiani), Kalmat Khor, Jiwani, Gwadar and along the entire Indus Delta, especially Khajar Creek, he said.

“Though it inhabits the coastal waters, sometimes it migrates to the river. In 1962, a large specimen of sawfish was caught in Hyderabad near Ghulam Mohammad Barrage about 170 kilometres from the coastline,” he said.

The initial findings of a recently launched study of the WWF-P have shown that sawfish fishery was flourishing four decades ago but the species became locally extinct by 1980s.

Information collected from old fishermen show that sawfish was so abundant that fishermen in some coastal villages used the saws (rostra) of the fish to erect boundary walls of their houses.

The major areas included in the study are Karachi, Damb (Balochistan) and Gwadar.

Published in Dawn, January 19th, 2016