---
title: Longcomb sawfish (Pristis zijsron)
scientific_name: Pristis zijsron
common_name: Longcomb sawfish
taxon: Sawfish
conservation_status: CR - Critically Endangered
published: 2024-11-04T17:46:36.094Z
updated: 2026-08-23T09:55:13.888Z
tags: Longcomb sawfish, Pristis zijsron, Sawfish, Red Sea, Marine Life, Diving
url: https://redseacreatures.com/taxon/fishes/rays/sawfish/longcomb-sawfish
---

# Longcomb sawfish (*Pristis zijsron*)

## Quick facts

- **Group:** Sawfish (*Pristidae*)
- **Size:** up to 7.3 m
- **Depth:** 1-70 m
- **Diet:** Carnivore
- **Activity:** Cathemeral
- **Rarity:** Very Rare
- **Habitat:** Shallow coastal sand and mud, estuarine shallows
- **Reproduction:** Live-bearer, Gonochoric
- **Hazard:** Dangerous
- **CITES:** Appendix I
- **Conservation status:** CR - Critically Endangered

## How to recognise it

- long flat blade of a snout with a row of teeth down each side
- shark-shaped body, but the gills are underneath, which makes it a ray
- very large, historically to more than seven meters
- shallow water over sand and mud

The saw is not a weapon bolted onto a fish. It is a sense organ that happens to cut.

The blade carries thousands of electroreceptive pores over its surface, arranged to sweep a field in front of the animal, and a sawfish uses it to detect the electrical activity of muscles in prey it cannot see: fish in murky water, animals buried in mud. Having found something, it strikes sideways, fast, and either impales the prey on the teeth or stuns it against the bottom. Then it works the pieces off the blade and eats them. High-speed filming settled the details only in the last twenty years.

What that shape also does is catch in netting. A saw is the perfect instrument for becoming entangled, and it is why this family collapsed faster than almost any group of large marine animals: every sawfish that meets a gillnet dies in it, whether or not anyone wanted to catch it. All species are Critically Endangered and the global range has shrunk by more than half.

In this sea it is a historical animal. There are old records and no recent confirmed sightings, and the working assumption is that it is gone from here. If you ever see one, tell someone with a camera.

## Also known as

- **English:** longcomb sawfish, Green Sawfish, Narrowsnout Sawfish
- **Arabic:** سمكة المنشار الخضراء, Sayyaf
- **French:** Poisson-scie
- **Spanish:** Pez Sierra, Pejepeine
- **TH:** ปลาฉนากเขียว
- **URD:** Blundo

## Scientific synonyms

- *Pristis zisron* Bleeker, 1851
- *Pristis zyrson* Bleeker, 1851
- *Pristis zysron* Bleeker, 1851
- *Pristis zysross* Bleeker, 1851

## Range

Federal Republic of Somalia, Kenya, Mozambique, Republic of Mauritius, South Africa

---

*Source: [Red Sea Creatures](https://redseacreatures.com/taxon/fishes/rays/sawfish/longcomb-sawfish)*
*Updated: August 23, 2026*