A small shark that does not usually exceed 1.6 m (5.2 ft) in length, this species is easily recognizable by its slender body and short but broad head, as well as tubular skin flaps beside the nostrils, oval eyes with vertical pupils, and white-tipped dorsal and caudal fins.

At night, whitetip reef sharks emerge to hunt bony fishes, crustaceans, and octopus in groups, their elongate bodies allowing them to force their way into crevices and holes to extract hidden prey.

The IUCN has assessed the whitetip reef shark as Vulnerable, noting its numbers are dwindling due to increasing levels of unregulated fishing activity across its range.

The whitetip reef shark was first described by the German naturalist Eduard Rüppell as Carcharias obesus, in the 1837 Fische des Rothen Meere (Fishes of the Red Sea).

As Rüppell did not originally designate a holotype, in 1960 a 31-cm-long specimen caught off Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, was made the species lectotype.

They are found near many major island chains as well, including Madagascar, Mauritius, Mayotte, the Comoros, the Aldabra Group, the Seychelles and the Chagos Archipelago.

[2] On occasion, they may enter water less than 1 m deep when foraging; there is an exceptional record of a whitetip reef shark being captured from a depth of 330 m (1,080 ft) off the Ryukyu Islands.

[2] This species is most active at night or during slack tide, and spends much of the day resting inside caves singly or in small groups, arranged in parallel or stacked atop one another.

Off Hawaii, these sharks may be found sheltering inside underwater lava tubes, while off Costa Rica they are often seen lying in the open on sandy flats.

[9] Whitetip reef sharks generally remain within a highly localized area; only rarely do they undertake long movements, wandering for a while before settling down somewhere new.

One study at Johnston Atoll found that none of the sharks examined had moved more than 3 km (1.9 mi) away from their original capture location over periods of up to a year.

[5] Another study at Rangiroa Atoll in French Polynesia found that, after more than three years, around 40% of the originally tagged sharks were still present on the same reef where they were first captured.

[5] This species feeds mainly on bony fishes, including eels, squirrelfishes, snappers, damselfishes, parrotfishes, surgeonfishes, triggerfishes and goatfishes, as well as octopuses, spiny lobsters, and crabs.

[2] The whitetip reef shark is highly responsive to the olfactory, acoustic, and electrical cues given off by potential prey, while its visual system is attuned more to movement and/or contrast than to object details.

After dusk, groups of sharks methodically scour the reef, often breaking off pieces of coral in their vigorous pursuit of prey.

In many cases, the female resists by pressing her belly against the bottom and arching her tail; this may reflect mate choice on her part.

The male has a limited time in which to achieve copulation, as while he is holding the female's pectoral fin in his mouth he is being deprived of oxygen.

[2][17] Females give birth while swimming, making violent twists and turns of their bodies; each pup takes under an hour to fully emerge.

However, these sharks readily attempt, and quite boldly, to steal catches from spear fishers, which has resulted in several people being bitten in the process.

[5] In some places, local whitetip reef sharks have learned to associate the sound of a speargun discharge or a boat dropping anchor with food and respond within seconds.

[25] The whitetip reef shark is taken by fisheries operating off Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, Madagascar, and likely elsewhere, using longlines, gillnets, and trawls.

[2][5] The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) has assessed this species as Vulnerable, as its numbers have dropped in recent decades due to increasing, and thus far unregulated, fishing pressure in the tropics.

[22] Its restricted habitat, low dispersal, and slow reproduction are factors that limit this shark's capacity for recovering from overfishing.