Diving with Sharks, The Rules That Actually Matter

The sharks you will meet

The species matters. Each one behaves differently, occupies different water, and responds to divers in its own way. Treating them as interchangeable, generic "sharks" that all need the same response, is the first mistake.

Oceanic whitetip (Carcharhinus longimanus), Critically Endangered globally, with one of its last strongholds in the Red Sea. Slow-moving, persistent, investigative. They follow the boat, they follow divers, and they do not leave because you look at them. They associate liveaboard boats with food scraps and have done for decades, this makes them bold around vessel moorings in a way they are not elsewhere. The oceanic is the species most people are unprepared for because it does not behave like a reef shark. It will approach. It will circle. It will come back. Staying calm and holding your position is most of the job. The rest, including the position the CDWS code of conduct asks for when one comes in close, is covered further down.

Scalloped hammerhead (Sphyrna lewini), schooling pelagics that move through offshore reefs in current-driven conditions, forming aggregations at depth in the early morning. They are skittish. They are not investigating you. They are moving through on their own route and will turn and leave if the group is large, loud, or descending aggressively toward them. Go deep, go slow, go quiet. Hold depth. Let them come to you or pass by on their own terms.

Pelagic thresher (Alopias pelagicus). This is the thresher divers meet in Egyptian water, not the common thresher. Elphinstone is the reliable site, with Daedalus behind it. They come in to cleaning stations at depth, usually around thirty to forty metres, in the window between first light and roughly eight in the morning, and they are back in open water by mid-morning. They are not interested in divers. A thresher that appears will cross the midwater and disappear. The encounter lasts exactly as long as you give it room. Hard finning toward it ends it immediately.

Grey reef shark (Carcharhinus amblyrhynchos), territorial. The grey reef is the species most likely to perform a threat display: back arched, pectoral fins dropped, exaggerated lateral swimming. If you see this, back away slowly. Do not turn. Do not approach. The grey reef is communicating clearly that you are too close, and it is the clearest example in the Red Sea of a shark telling you something directly and your response changing what happens next.

Whitetip reef shark (Triaenodon obesus), nocturnal hunters, resting during the day on the reef or in overhangs. Almost universally uninterested in divers. If you see one moving during a day dive it will pass you without acknowledgment. Treat them with the same respect as any other species and they require no special consideration.

Before you enter the water

The encounter begins before you roll off the boat. Guides who dive these sites regularly will brief you on what is in the water that day and how they want the group to behave. Listen to that briefing properly. Not as background noise while you check your camera settings. The signals your guide uses underwater are usually established in the briefing, if you miss them, you are diving without a communication channel.

Check your buoyancy before you go anywhere near a shark site. An uncontrolled diver thrashing to hold depth is the single most disruptive presence in the water. Sharks read movement. A diver who is finning constantly to stay at depth looks and sounds nothing like a neutrally buoyant one. If your buoyancy is not good enough to hold position in a current without effort, this will cost you every encounter.

At offshore liveaboard sites where oceanics are known to patrol, do not enter the water with food on your person, and do not enter immediately after anyone has been handling bait or fish at the back of the boat. If the boat has been fishing, wait. These animals have learned to associate certain cues with food. There is no reason to add yourself to that association.

The ten rules

The rules below are not elaborate. Most of them are consistent across species and conditions, and the common thread is that you are removing the stimuli that trigger investigation or avoidance, and replacing them with stillness that lets the animal treat you as part of the environment. Two of them are specific to oceanic whitetips, and the article says so where that applies.

1. Remember whose ocean you're in

You are a visitor in their habitat. That is not a sentimental point, it is the practical basis for everything else on this list. You do not need to be frightened of sharks and you do not need to pretend they are harmless. The CDWS shark guidelines put it about as well as it can be put: respect them for what they are, self-confident and inquisitive wild predators.

The shark does not owe you a photograph or a close pass. If it holds its distance, that is the encounter, and it is a good one. Divers who cannot accept that are the ones who start closing the gap, and they are usually the ones who surface with nothing.

2. Stay with your group

Do not break away from the group to get a better angle. This is the rule divers bend most often and it has the clearest evidence behind it: the CDWS guidelines note that oceanic whitetips are more likely to closely approach single or isolated divers than groups. The collective silhouette of a group is simply less interesting than one diver hanging alone in the blue.

Keep track of your buddy even when everybody is watching the same animal. A group that has all turned to face one shark is a group that has stopped looking at each other. That is how divers end up separated, and how a second animal arrives without anyone noticing. Do not dive these sites alone.

3. Let the shark come to you

Chasing does not work. If you fin aggressively toward most sharks you end the encounter yourself, usually in the first ten seconds. Hammerheads turn and go. Threshers drop back into the blue. Grey reefs move off the wall. The animal decides how close it wants to be, and it makes that decision based on what you are doing.

Hold your position. Hold your depth. Let it close the distance on its terms rather than yours. The longest encounters almost always belong to the diver who did the least.

4. Don't touch or harass sharks

Do not touch. Do not grab. Do not block its path, do not surround it, do not corner it against a wall, and do not chase it with a camera. That is the baseline and it has no exceptions.

There is one situation that gets confused with this, and the distinction matters. An oceanic whitetip can come very close, and the code of conduct sets out a graded response for exactly that. First, stay calm and hold position. At close range, within roughly thirty centimetres, push a wave of water toward the shark, ideally toward the gill area, to turn it away. If it keeps coming, put something between you: a fin, a camera housing, a shark stick, any solid object used as a buffer. Only as a last resort do you guide or gently push the animal away with your hands.

That is defensive redirection, not interaction. You are not touching the shark because you want to. The same guidance is equally clear on the other half of it: do not act aggressively toward a shark, because that can trigger a defensive reaction. Calm and deliberate, never a shove.

5. Move slowly

Avoid quick, erratic movement with your arms and fins, and keep your hands tucked in. No splashing, no frantic kicking, no sudden lunges for the camera. Sharks read movement, and a diver who is working hard to hold depth reads very differently from one who is simply there.

Sharks cannot sense that you are frightened. They have ampullae of Lorenzini, electroreceptors that pick up the very weak electrical fields produced by living animals at close range, and that fact gets stretched online into sharks smelling fear or reading your heartbeat. It does not work like that. What a nervous diver actually does is kick harder, breathe faster, lose buoyancy and move unpredictably, and the behaviour is the part the animal notices. Fix the behaviour and the question of what a shark can sense stops mattering.

6. Keep the shark in sight

Keep your eyes on the animal, particularly with an inquisitive species. If an oceanic starts making repeated close passes, watch it and turn with it. The guidelines are specific about the thing divers get wrong here: do not turn around and swim away from a shark. If you need to leave, fin backwards toward the boat or the reef with slow, deliberate movements while still watching it.

Look around as well. There may be more than one animal, and the one you are not watching is the one that surprises you. This is awareness, not paranoia. Most dives with sharks are uneventful, and they stay uneventful because people are paying attention.

7. Control your buoyancy and your position

Good buoyancy matters on every dive and it matters more on this one. Quick, uncontrolled changes in depth, up or down, can spark a shark's curiosity and cause it to follow. If you cannot hold position in a current without constant effort, that will cost you encounters long before it costs you anything else.

Then there is the oceanic whitetip rule, and this is where older advice was simply wrong. When an oceanic approaches closely, the CDWS guidance is to slowly take a vertical position in the water column, and to follow the shark by pivoting in that vertical position with minimal movement. Not horizontal. Divers were told for years to stay flat because a vertical silhouette supposedly reads as prey. That is not the current guidance for this species.

This applies to oceanic whitetips on a close approach. It is not a rule for hammerheads, threshers, grey reefs or reef sharks generally, and it is not a posture to hold for a whole dive. Normal trim for normal diving. Vertical and facing the animal when an oceanic comes in.

8. Know the species

There is no single thing called shark behaviour. A hammerhead, a thresher, a grey reef and an oceanic whitetip behave so differently that advice which fits one can be useless, or actively counterproductive, for another.

A hammerhead is skittish and will leave if you drop toward it. A thresher is indifferent and will pass through whatever you do. A grey reef is territorial and will tell you when you have come too close. An oceanic is investigative and will keep coming back. Same water, four different encounters, four different correct responses. Read the species sections above before the trip, not on the boat.

9. Learn when behaviour changes

The clearest signal in the Red Sea is the grey reef threat display: back arched, pectoral fins dropped, exaggerated lateral swimming. It is unmistakable once you have seen it, and it means you are too close. Back away slowly, do not turn your back, give the animal room, and the situation resolves.

Beyond that one display, read changes rather than individual movements. The guidelines frame it as noticing a shark getting excited or agitated, and the response is to keep your distance or leave the area calmly and in good order. Faster or more erratic swimming, passes that get tighter and more frequent, a shift in posture, a general lift in activity, those are worth acting on. A shark swimming past you at five metres is not a threat display. Divers who read every movement as aggression tend to produce the behaviour they were worried about.

10. Enjoy it

Seeing a shark in the wild is one of the best things that happens underwater, and it is worth actually watching. Divers spend whole encounters behind a viewfinder and surface having seen the animal through a three-inch screen. Get the shot, then put the camera down for a minute. Watch how it moves, how little effort it uses, how the reef fish react to it.

Being responsible is not the price of the encounter. It is the reason there is one at all. Divers who behave well get longer encounters, and sites that are dived well keep their sharks.

When a shark comes close

A close approach is not an attack. It is an inspection. Sharks investigate unfamiliar objects, particularly objects that produce sound, bubbles or light. An oceanic whitetip that swims directly toward you is doing what oceanics do, gathering information, and it may do it more than once. Repeated close passes are normal for the species and are not by themselves a sign that anything is going wrong.

Keep it in sight. Slowly take the vertical position and pivot to stay facing it. Stay with the group. Keep your hands tucked in and your movements small. If it comes inside roughly thirty centimetres, use the escalation described above: water wave first, an object as a buffer second, a hand to guide it away only as a last resort.

What to avoid is sudden retreat. Backing off hard, splashing, a burst of frantic finning or a scramble for the surface all change the interaction, and none of them change it in your favour. Slow and deliberate is the entire technique. If you need to leave, fin backwards toward the boat or the reef while watching the animal.

The grey reef threat display is a different situation. That is not curiosity, it is a warning, and the correct response is to give ground rather than hold it.

At the surface

The surface is where oceanic encounters get complicated, and it is worth being specific rather than repeating the line that you should never surface when sharks are around. The guidance is to limit unnecessary time on the surface. Check the water beneath the boat before you enter. Descend promptly rather than hanging about on top, and stay below about five metres where you can, which also keeps you clear of zodiac traffic.

For pickups, follow your guide's procedure instead of improvising. That usually means fewer divers on the surface at once, going up singly or in pairs, and getting into the zodiac before collecting kit if that is what the crew asks for. If a surface line is rigged, pull yourself along it calmly by hand, stay alert, and stop to face any shark that approaches. Do not race to the surface because an oceanic is nearby, and do not let yourself be towed behind a zodiac.

Cameras and flash

The blanket rule against flash photography around sharks is not in the current Egyptian guidance, and it is not much use in that form. Follow the operator's briefing for the dive and the species in front of you. Some encounters carry their own rules, the thresher cleaning stations at Elphinstone among them, where operators frequently ask for no flash without approval. If flash is discouraged, respect it. Either way, do not fire repeatedly into an animal's face at close range. That is harassment, whatever is in your hands.

What these encounters actually are

Globally, the abundance of oceanic sharks and rays has fallen by around 71 percent since 1970, driven by an eighteen-fold rise in fishing pressure. That figure comes from a 2021 study in Nature and it is the one worth carrying, because it is measured rather than estimated from anecdote. The Red Sea has not been exempt from any of it. What it still has is a handful of offshore sites where these animals remain present in numbers most of the world lost decades ago.

The etiquette described in this article protects the diver in the short term and the animal in the long term. Sharks that come to associate divers with stress move off the sites. Sites that lose their sharks lose everything that made them worth going to. The rules are not an inconvenience. They are the reason the encounter is possible.

Sharks are part of what makes the Red Sea what it is. Protecting them is not only a conservation question. Healthy shark populations are part of a functioning marine ecosystem, and they are one of the reasons divers travel across the world to get here. A living shark keeps returning value to the reef and to the dive economy built around it. A dead one pays once.

The Red Sea Atlas supports shark protection across Egyptian waters, and responsible shark diving practice from operators, guides and divers alike. If your guide is not briefing the group on conduct around sharks before anyone gets in the water, dive with somebody else.

Guidance on oceanic whitetip encounters follows Diving with Oceanic Whitetips: Safe Diving Practices and Guidelines, published by the Chamber of Diving and Watersports (CDWS) Egypt and prepared by Dr Elke Bojanowski of the Red Sea Sharks project. Conservation status for oceanic whitetip and scalloped hammerhead follows the IUCN Red List. The global decline figure is from Pacoureau et al., Half a Century of Global Decline in Oceanic Sharks and Rays, Nature, 2021. Species detail and site detail draw on the Atlas marine life pages and on a decade of diving these reefs.