Largetooth sawfish
Adults are primarily found in estuaries and marine waters to a depth of , but mostly less than . Nevertheless, the species does appear to have a greater affinity for freshwater habitats than the smalltooth sawfish ("P. pectinata"), green sawfish ("P. zijsron"), and dwarf sawfish ("P. clavata"). Largetooth sawfish from the population in Lake Nicaragua appear to spend most, if not all, of their life in freshwater, but tagging surveys indicate that at least some do move between this lake and the sea. Captive studies show that this euryhaline species can thrive long-term in both salt and freshwater, regardless of its age, and that an acclimation from salt to freshwater is faster than the opposite. In captivity they are known to be agile (even swimming backwards), have an unusual ability to "climb" with the use of the pectoral fins and they can jump far out of the water; a individual jumped to a height of . It has been suggested that this may be adaptions for traversing medium-sized waterfalls and rapids when moving upriver. They are generally found in areas with a bottom consisting of sand, mud or silt. The preferred water temperature is between , and or colder is lethal.
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.