Sawfish
The dwarf and largetooth sawfish are strictly warm-water species that generally live in waters that are and respectively. The green and smalltooth sawfish also occur in colder waters, in the latter down to , as illustrated by their (original) distributions that ranged further north and south of the strictly warm-water species. Sawfish are bottom-dwellers, but in captivity it has been noted that at least the largetooth and green sawfish readily take food from the water surface. Sawfish are mostly found in places with soft bottoms such as mud or sand, but may also occur over hard rocky bottoms or at coral reefs. They are often found in areas with seagrass or mangrove.
Longcomb sawfish
A combination of characters are necessary to distinguish it from the other sawfish species: the longcomb sawfish has teeth to near the base of the rostrum or "saw" (unlike the knifetooth sawfish, "Anoxypristis cuspidata"), 23–37 teeth on each side of the rostrum (18–24 in the dwarf sawfish, "P. clavata", 20–32 in smalltooth sawfish, "P. pectinata", and 14–24 in largetooth sawfish, "P. pristis"), the teeth towards the tip of the rostrum are clearly closer to each other than those at its base (unlike the dwarf, smalltooth and largetooth sawfish where either equally spaced or only marginally closer to each other towards the tip of the rostrum), a relatively narrow rostrum, width equalling 9–17% of its length (typically wider in dwarf and largetooth sawfish), a rostrum that is 23–33% of the total length of the fish (20–25% in dwarf sawfish), relatively short pectoral fins (unlike the knifetooth and largetooth sawfish), a leading edge of the dorsal fin that is located clearly behind the leading edge of the pelvic fins (in front of in largetooth sawfish and roughly above in smalltooth sawfish) and it has a very small or no lower tail lobe (present in knifetooth and largetooth sawfish). It can be further separated from the two most similar species, the dwarf and smalltooth sawfish, by the considerably smaller maximum size of the former species, and the less greenish colour (when alive/recently dead) and essentially Atlantic distribution of the latter species. The smalltooth and longcomb sawfish might historically have come into contact in South Africa, but sawfish appear to have been extirpated from this country.