Where have the sawfish of Sri Lanka gone?-By Sahan Thilakaratna, Akshay Tanna, and Daniel Fernando Source:Dailymirror Have you ever seen a creature with a 1.5 meter saw attached to its 6 meter body?  Word travelled fast along the dusty roads of Kuchchaveli (Trincomalee district) and soon the area was filled with curious people keen to get a glimpse of this mysterious creature, which to them was like the legends of mermaids or dragons. But this is not a fairy tale and was narrated by a fisherman who caught this fish in March 2017 – on his son’s birthday. This mysterious fish, or to be precise, ray, was a sawfish (“Dathi Mora” in Sinhala and “Vela” in Tamil). They belong to the “cartilaginous fishes”, which include all sharks and rays. What is distinct about sawfishes are their saw-like rostra with “teeth” on either side that are an extension of their skulls!  They were ...

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