The Japanese saw shark has a distinctive pointy mouth with sharp spikes on the side, big and small lined up in one line. As the name suggests, its mouth looks like a saw.

They live near sand and mud at the bottom of the ocean and can be found at sea near Japan and East China Sea. Large ones can grow up to be 150 cm in length.

It is said that they dig up and pierce their prey such as small fish, shrimps, crabs, and squids, with their sharp mouth out of the ocean floor using their saw-like mouth. In the tank, they usually stay still at the bottom and rarely move, but when we throw in food it starts to swim and quickly wave its mouth left and right. The long mustache found around the middle of the mouth functions as a sensor to find prey that’s hiding under the sand.

They are viviparous and give birth to babies about 30 cm in length. They give birth to about 12 babies at once. Newborn saw sharks have their spikes folded backwards. It is predicted that this is so that they do not damage the insides of the mother shark.

The spikes gradually pop out and takes shape of a saw in nearly a week, like the name suggests.