Sawfish
The pregnancy lasts several months. There are 1–23 young in each sawfish litter, which are long at birth. In the embryos the rostrum is flexible and it only hardens shortly before birth. To protect the mother the saws of the young have a soft cover, which falls off shortly after birth. The pupping grounds are in coastal and estuarine waters. In most species the young generally stay there for the first part of their lives, occasionally moving upriver when there is an increase in salinity. The exception is the largetooth sawfish where the young move upriver into freshwater where they stay for 3–5 years, sometimes as much as from the sea. In at least the smalltooth sawfish the young show a degree of site fidelity, generally staying in the same fairly small area in the first part of their lives. In the green and dwarf sawfish there are indications that both sexes remain in the same overall region throughout their lives with little mixing between the subpopulations. In the largetooth sawfish the males appear to move more freely between the subpopulations, while mothers return to the region where they were born to give birth to their own young.
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.