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.
Sawfish
Historically they ranged in the East Atlantic from Morocco to South Africa, and in the West Atlantic from New York (United States) to Uruguay, including the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico. There are old reports (last in the late 1950s or shortly after) from the Mediterranean and these have typically been regarded as vagrants, but a review of records strongly suggests that this sea had a breeding population. In the East Pacific they ranged from Mazatlán (Mexico) to northern Peru. Although the Gulf of California occasionally has been included in their range, the only known Pacific Mexican records of sawfish are from south of its mouth. They were widespread in the western and central Indo-Pacific, ranging from South Africa to the Red Sea and Persian Gulf, east and north to Korea and southern Japan, through Southeast Asia to Papua New Guinea and Australia. Today sawfish have disappeared from much of their historical range.