Fishermen in Balochistan have caught a critically endangered Longcomb sawfish in Jiwani, near the Pakistan-Iran border.
The endangered fish was caught on Saturday, October 29, a World Wide Fund for Nature-Pakistan (WWF-Pakistan) official announced on Monday. He added that the species, scientifically called ‘Pristis zijsron,’ is extremely rare and faces extinction.
According to the official, three species of sawfish, namely, Knifetooth (Anoxypristis cuspidatus), Largetooth (Pristis pristis), and Longcomb (Pristis zijsron), thrive in Pakistan.
“However, due to overfishing and habitat degradation, the population of sawfish has decreased substantially, and they are now considered to be nearly extinct at the local level,” he added.
Over the past decade, only three occurrences of these sawfishes have been recorded in Pakistan. The last of them came on May 30, 2013, when a large Longcomb sawfish was caught by fishermen at the Khajar Creek.
Ghulam Nabi, a senior fisherman from Jiwani and WWF-Pakistan team member, visited the location and collected required information about the sawfish.
Later, he told media that the fish was caught in a bottom-set gillnet deployed for catching demersal fish at the border between Pakistan and Iran.
According to fishermen, the sawfish was an extremely rare occurrence, and it was caught after about 30 years in the area. At one time, sawfish dominated among shark species, but due to the introduction of motorized fishing vessels and nylon nets, their population started to dwindle.
Muhammad Moazzam Khan, the WWF-Pakistan marine fisheries technical adviser, said that in the past, the main areas of sawfish fishing in Pakistan were Miani Hor (Sonmiani), Kalmat Khor, Jiwani, Gwadar, Pakistan-Iranian border, and the fish was reported all along the Indus Delta, especially the Khajar Creek.
Further, the WWF-Pakistan has started interviewing retired fishermen of Karachi, Sonmiani, Gwadar, Jiwani, Ibrahim Hyderi, and other coastal areas to collect the data on sawfish in Pakistan.
The information collected so far reveals that the above-mentioned species of sawfish were flourishing in Pakistan’s waters until the 1980s. They were so abundant that in some coastal villages, fishermen used their saws as boundary posts.
That Baluch who caught rare fish is PAKISTANI why you people always are anti Pakistan?