A heavy, slow shark that hovers in gutters and caves off the east coast. It looks dangerous and is not.
To about 3.2 m, heavy-bodied and grey-brown above with a paler belly, and in young animals scattered rusty spots on the rear half. The head is conical, the snout flattened, and the two dorsal fins are nearly the same size and set well back — which is the quickest way to separate it from the requiem sharks, whose first dorsal is much the larger and sits further forward. Its reputation comes from the mouth: the teeth are long, narrow and visible even when the jaws are closed, and the animal looks like the shark of the poster. It is not one. In other countries the same species is called the sand tiger or the ragged-tooth shark.
It hovers, which almost no other shark does. It gulps air at the surface and holds it in the stomach, giving it neutral buoyancy, so it can hang almost motionless in a gutter or a cave with the current running past. That behaviour is why it is diveable: a group of them will stay in one gutter through a whole dive and tolerate divers a few metres away. The east coast aggregation sites in New South Wales are the reliable ones and several are protected. Approach on the level and let the shark hold its position rather than swimming into the gutter behind it; the animals move off when crowded and the site is then finished for everybody.
Ratings are per location: 1 means found on most dives that look for it, 5 means a handful of records. Where enough dives have been logged the figure is calculated from them; otherwise it is an editorial estimate, and says so. We publish habitat and destination, not the dive site.