What’s to prevent pups, with a snout that resembles a hedge trimmer, from slicing and dicing each other in mom’s uterus? Scientists have the answer.
Smalltooth sawfish develop their signature, long, tooth-lined snout while still in the womb. The needle-sharp teeth are encased in a specialized sheath that prevents the rays from cutting up their mother and siblings during gestation and birth. Now, scientists have gotten their first close-up look at this built-in pocket protector.
“I think a lot of the descriptions historically are based on the fact that people have just seen them in pictures,” says Dean Grubbs, a fish ecologist at Florida State University’s Coastal and Marine Laboratory in St. Teresa who was not involved in the work. “It’s a significant structure … as you would expect it to be if it is going to essentially shield those really sharp points.”
, is found primarily in waters off South Florida and the western Bahamas. The ray is so rare that it took Poulakis and colleagues 18 years of near-monthly research trips to collect a handful of sheath tissue samples.
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