Hope, then heartbreak, as first ‘spinning’ sawfish dies in Tampa Bay

GULF OF MEXICO — The day was supposed to be a celebration.

As one of Florida’s rarest marine animals dies at alarming rates, a team of shark researchers had a surge of hope when, two days earlier, they caught a healthy adult smalltooth sawfish offshore Tampa Bay.

Not only was this the first ever adult tagged by a researcher in the bay area, the animal’s healthy blood would be compared to the blood of sick and dead sawfish in the Florida Keys. Maybe, researchers said, this animal could help apprehend a mystery killer that has left at least 53 endangered sawfish dead and countless others spinning erratically this year.

Catching the prehistoric-looking creature with its chainsaw snout came as a surprise to the team of biologists who had tried unsuccessfully to tag an adult in the bay area since 2019. Five weeklong expeditions had come up empty, until now.

Below: See video footage from the moment the crew tagged their first adult sawfish in the Tampa Bay area last week

On Friday morning, spirits were high onboard the research boat offshore Anna Maria Island. Vanilla Ice blasted through the speakers, the crew munched on pretzels and Cheez-Its, and the Gulf of Mexico was flat as glass.

And then Lukas Heath got a phone call.

“They just got a report of a large sawfish swimming in circles off the beach at Bay Pines,” said Heath, a sawfish biologist with the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. He announced to the crew that about two dozen miles to the north in Pinellas County a sawfish was acting strange. An eyewitness reported to a state hotline that it looked like something was wrong.

“I wouldn’t expect it all the way up here,” Heath said solemnly. “But that’s par for the course with this crisis.”

Since January, Heath has been one of the main responders to the dozens of reports of dead sawfish washing up across South Florida. But that die-off was unfolding hundreds of miles south of here. This was supposed to be a fun day of catching healthy sharks in Tampa Bay and, if lucky, another healthy sawfish.

Instead, Heath sat quietly on the bow as he took in information from the phone. A kayak guide saw the male sawfish thrashing earlier that morning on a mangrove flat in Boca Ciega Bay, near War Veterans Memorial Park. It seemed “huge,” they said, and it was clear it was sick.

Realization set in for the crew: They would attempt to find it.

“This is not good, Lukas,” said Tonya Wiley, team leader of the Smalltooth Sawfish Recovery Team and director of Palmetto-based Havenworth Coastal Conservation. The engines whirred to life as the boat began its journey northbound.

“We’ve got spinning sawfish in Tampa Bay now.”

‘Chasing shadows’

Reports of odd fish spinning behavior and unusual swirling began in November 2023. It started with small inshore species like pinfish, a favorite bait species used by anglers across Florida. But by January, biologists had their first confirmed report in the Keys of a dead sawfish, the first marine fish to earn federal protections under the Endangered Species Act in 2003.

Scientists still aren’t entirely sure what’s causing the die-off, but they’re getting closer to pinning down an answer. Florida’s state wildlife and environmental agencies have ruled out exposure to red tide, water temperature and salinity. The state’s main focus, according to a wildlife spokesperson, is now on harmful algal blooms and the toxins they produce.

If a sawfish is spinning in Tampa Bay, does that mean it’s “catching” whatever is making it sick in this region? It’s unlikely.

The current scientific thinking is that the area of concern remains in South Florida. Sawfish are swimming in the Florida Keys and contracting whatever is causing them to act erratically. But then those fish are swimming miles as they head north during the summer. They have episodes of bizarre whirling and thrashing along the way.

“It’s distressing to see the animals dead and dying,” said Dean Grubbs, the associate director of research at Florida State University’s Coastal and Marine Laboratory. Grubbs is also a member of the sawfish recovery team and was on the boat last week when the crew caught the healthy sawfish.

“I try to keep the emotions out of it as much as I can. Where I do see the emotional impact, though, is on my students — particularly my students that work on sawfish,” Grubbs said. “You can see it on their faces.”

It’s not just sawfish: More than 50 species have been affected by the bizarre event, including stingrays, sharks, crabs and groupers. People have sent at least 500 eyewitness reports of abnormal behavior and fish kills to state wildlife hotlines, according to the latest Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission data. Heath and his team of fellow sawfish biologists are monitoring the calls daily.

Now, one of those hotline calls had sent the researchers on a potential recovery mission. The crew spent an hour Friday morning motoring more than 20 miles north to John’s Pass with the hopes they’d find the struggling sawfish.

As the boat cut through the Gulf, Heath gathered and shared intel from the initial report, including its location and its impressive size of more than 10 feet long. Video from a witness showed the sawfish along a bank of mangroves in shallow water, clearly distressed and thrashing its chainsaw snout, called a rostrum, above the surface.

Below: See eyewitness video footage last week from the first known report of sawfish dying in Tampa Bay from a mysterious die-off

The team called Adam Brame, the sawfish recovery coordinator for the federal National Marine Fisheries Service. Brame was an integral part of the first ever sawfish rescue in early April off Cudjoe Key, and he just so happened to live in St. Petersburg. This time, the crisis had come to him.

Brame arrived to the shoreline about 15 minutes before the boat crew. He quickly rented a kayak and started scanning the dense mangroves for any signs of life.

“Adam has a visual on the sawfish,” Wiley, on the phone with Brame, announced to the crew with nervous excitement as they approached Bay Pines.

When the research crew arrived a few minutes later, Brame pulled up to the boat on his kayak and gave them an update: He saw the sawfish’s two dorsal fins slicing through the water, and he paddled behind it as it swam toward a nearby cove. He had just lost sight of it as the boat arrived.

For the next two hours, the crew did everything they could to find the sawfish. They set out 100 hooks baited with ladyfish, another federal scientist arrived to patrol the water on a kayak and a drone circled the air, all searching for the hidden creature.

Heath calls this part of his job “chasing shadows” — the arduous search for an animal that lives and breathes underwater. When you’re hunting for something as elusive as the sawfish, every shadow catches your eye, he explained.

“There’s only so many of us, and the sawfish is living in such a large geographical area,” Heath said. “Depending on how long it takes you to get there, or where it is, you might just miss it.”

When the hooks came up empty and the drone’s batteries had died, the crew called off the search. The hopes that set the tone for the day had all but vanished. What remained was a quiet mourning for what researchers feared would become of the sawfish.

On Monday, the fate of the animal became clear.

The male sawfish washed up dead along the same shoreline where it was spotted last week. Deputies with Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office retrieved the carcass, and Heath conducted an animal autopsy.

Until last week, the northernmost reports of sick sawfish were from the Jensen Beach area on Florida’s Atlantic coast, and Charlotte Harbor on Florida’s Gulf coast, according to Heath. This is now the first confirmed death in Tampa Bay related to the ongoing die-off, and it’s the northernmost death in the state.

Researchers hope it will be the last.

Note: All photographs and reporting of research activities in this story were performed under the authority and guidelines of Endangered Species Act permit #21857 and state special activities licenses permit #1918.

If you’d like to help the sawfish research or rescue efforts, you can donate by visiting sawfishrecovery.org. To report a sawfish sighting, email Sawfish@MyFWC.com or call 844-472-9347.