Rescued Sawfish at Mote Marine Laboratory

Different species of fish have been reported acting in strange ways since October 2023, including spinning in circles before their untimely deaths. Amongst the species are the endangered smalltooth sawfish, raising concerns for citizens who call the Everglades their home. Investigations are ongoing for the cause of erratic behavior in the fish; the FWC, NOAA fisheries, Mote Marine Laboratory and other partners are strenuously searching for answers. 

The latest report was on Friday, April 5, 2024, when a member of the public called the sawfish hotline after witnessing it swimming in circles in Cudjoe Bay in the Florida Keys. Mote Marine Laboratory and the Florida Wildlife Commission teamed together with skilled scientists and veterinary staff to gather a quick field assessment on the sawfish. The assessment included taking samples, measurements, and tagging the sawfish before it was taken to a temporary holding tank at a Mote facility. There, the sawfish was stabilized although it remained in critical condition.

On April 11, a team decided that the sawfish was capable of tolerating a several-hour drive to a more extensively quarantined Mote facility. Mote plans on providing ‘round-the-clock surveillance of the sawfish by a qualified team as instructed by the FWC and Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Fisheries. 

Dr. Dean Grubbs, a fish ecologist based at Florida University’s Coastal and Marine Lab, explained that Mote, as a partner, is a housing facility for the sick sawfish while the recovery efforts are led by FWC biologists. “A lot of other people are helping out, including one of my students that is down there right now,” said Grubbs. “We’re looking for different sites that they can use to rehabilitate the sick sawfish. That’s the first one we’re going to try so far, the one that made it up to Mote last week.”

The emergency response efforts are the first of its kind to have several agencies participating in the rehabilitation and hopefully release of the smalltooth sawfish. 109 sawfish have been affected by the unknown sickness causing concern for the imperiled species. Grubbs says, “The biggest issue right now is that we don’t know the scale of this mortality. We’ve got over 40 that have died so far, but we don’t know how many that have died overall. There’s probably a lot more that have died that we don’t see.” Grubbs and his team were seeing positive signs of recovery for the species classified as critically endangered just over 20 years ago, however, this recent series of abnormal behavior and deaths is causing a severe setback to the revival of the smalltooth sawfish population.

Grubbs and his team have been studying adult sawfish for 14 years now, playing a vital role in the recovery and research of the species. They track the movement of adults to figure out where and when they’re mating, where they give birth, and where the important habitats are located for further preservation. “Smalltooth sawfish were the first saltwater fish ever listed as endangered under the U.S. Endangered Species Act,” Grubbs explains. “We’re interested in where they are at the highest risk of being caught…so, we’ve been looking at where the important habitats are, where their bycatch risk is, and trying to figure out what the reproductive cycles are like for a number of years.”

Recently, the attention of Grubbs and his team has been focused on the strange event occurring in the Keys that is responsible for dozens of smalltooth sawfish deaths. “We don’t know the cause of it yet. Now we’ve been stepping up sampling of any sawfish we catch so that we can provide samples of healthy sawfish to the folks studying the dead and dying sawfish to see what differences there are, to see if that gives us any insight to what the cause is,” says Grubbs. 

The public can assist in the efforts to find the cause of the sick sawfish by reporting all sawfish observations (healthy, sick, injured, or dead) to 844-427-9347 or sawfish@myfwc.com. They can also report abnormal fish behavior and fish kills to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission’s Fish Kill Hotline at 800-636-0511 or MyFWC.com/ReportFishKill. To support the Sawfish Rescue Initiative please go to www.mote.org/sawfish.