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Project news

The Sawfish Arrived: student outreach event was a success

materials available for a International Sawfish Day outreach. Photo © Jens Hegg
By Jens Hegg, 9th January 2026

Back in October of 2025 we spread the word: the sawfish were coming! The Current Archives Lab here at Gonzaga University was well prepared for International Sawfish Day, having printed 3D sawfish toys and prepared our outreach materials to introduce campus to sawfish and sawfish conservation. The big day was a big success!

Over the lunch hour we had large numbers of students stop by, mostly to ask “what is a sawfish”, or “what is that thing?” while pointing at the dried largetooth sawfish rostrum from our natural history collection. Each visitor spun a prize wheel for either a 3D printed sawfish toy, or a piece of Save Our Seas Foundation merch…but…to win they had to correctly answer a question about sawfish or sawfish conservation! They could study the SOSF and Sawfish Conservation Society outreach materials we had available, and they could ask as many questions of the lab members as they wanted. When they were confident they knew enough about sawfish they would ask for their question.

The members of the Current Archives Lab hosting an International Sawfish Day table in the student union of Gonzaga University. Photo © Jens Hegg

Gonzaga students must be as sharp as sawfish rostral teeth, because nobody left without their prize! Not only that, multiple people started their day having never heard of sawfish and all of them ended up knowing more about sawfish and how to get involved in protecting them. We think it was a successful day!

Since October 16th the lab has settled back into research. We’re about to submit our first paper related to our sawfish work this January, and have submitted abstracts for Sharks International this coming May in Colombo, Sri Lanka. We spent our time refining our isotope analysis and digging deeper into the internal structure of sawfish teeth. We’re looking forward to submitting additional peer-reviewed manuscripts ahead of the meeting in Sri Lanka this summer and have our eyes set on new sawfish projects on the horizon building on what we’ve learned.

 

Project
Tracking time through teeth

Jens is unlocking information about how and where largetooth sawfish spend their lives through the chemistry of their teeth. The long, toothed rostrum for which sawfish are named might hold some answers about where a sawfish grew up, where it moved, how fast it grew during each period of life, and how its place in the food web changed as it grew. That’s because rostral teeth lay down chemical traces throughout a sawfish’s life. The low numbers of living sawfish mean that Jens is looking at ways to use historical specimens in museums to develop insight into the fine details of the lives of sawfish.

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