Bony fish and cephalopods are the main components of its diet and females give live birth.

[5] The rules of the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature are that in general the first-published description has priority; therefore, the valid scientific name for the oceanic whitetip shark should be Carcharhinus maou.

[8] The shark spends most of its time in the upper layer of the ocean—to a depth of 150 m (490 ft)[3]—and prefers off-shore, deep-ocean areas.

According to longline capture data, increasing distance from land correlates to a greater population of sharks.

[5] It is sometimes found close to land, in waters as shallow as only 37 m (120 ft) deep, mainly around oceanic islands and narrow continental shelves.

[5] During summer, when the water surface is warmer, oceanic whitetips tend to swim more quickly and at deeper depths.

[13] The species feeds mainly on pelagic cephalopods, like squid, and bony fish,[3] such as lancetfish, oarfish, barracuda, jacks, mahi-mahi, marlin, tuna, and mackerel.

However, its diet can be far more varied and less selective—it is known to eat threadfins, stingrays, sea turtles, seabirds, gastropods, crustaceans, and marine mammal carcasses.

Whitetips commonly compete for food with silky sharks, explaining its comparatively leisurely swimming style combined with aggressive displays.

[5] Evidence in the form of sucker scars on the skin of an individual filmed off Hawaii indicate that the species may also dive deep enough to battle with giant squid.

[21] Author and big-game fisherman Ernest Hemingway depicted them as aggressive opportunists that attacked the catch of fishermen in The Old Man and the Sea.

[24][25] Also during World War II, the RMS Nova Scotia, a steamship carrying about 1,000 people near South Africa, was sunk by a German submarine.

[26] Subsequently, the species is recorded to have attacked 21 people between 1955 and 2020, including nine divers, eight swimmers, two fishermen, one shipwrecked person and one fallen pilot.

[27] In Egypt in 2010, one oceanic whitetip was implicated in several bites on tourists in the Red Sea near Sharm El Sheikh, resulting in one death and four injuries to humans.

[28][29] In October 2019, an oceanic whitetip shark brutally attacked a female snorkeler off Mo'orea, French Polynesia, but the person survived.

Based on eyewitness reports and examinations of the bites, the shark appears to have been acting like a predator attacking prey.

One of these, a female in Monterey Bay Aquarium's Outer-Bay exhibit, lived for more than three years before dying in 2003, during which it grew 0.3 m (1 ft).

While their total global population is unknown, they are estimated to have declined by around 98 percent "with the highest probability of >80% reduction over three generation lengths (61.2 years)".

[32] A study focusing on the northwest Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico, using a mix of data from US pelagic longline surveys from the mid-1950s and observations from the late 1990s, estimated a decline in numbers in this location of 99.3% over this period.

[6] Bycatching of oceanic whitetip sharks may be reduced by removing hooks from longliners when they are in shallow water.