Tiger sharks use deeper water as they grow: maximum diving depth rose about four times from sharks 150 cm long to sharks 300 cm long. In the Gulf of Mexico, older tiger sharks appeared to travel faster and swim into deeper habitat off the continental shelf more often than juveniles did. Tags on 21 tiger sharks at Ningaloo Reef, Western Australia, showed that swimming up and down in dives used less energy than swimming at one depth. Satellite-tagged tiger sharks in the Coral Sea dove to a depth of 1,136 meters, and twenty young tiger sharks tagged off northeastern Brazil used waters up to 1,112 meters deep. In the western North Atlantic, all tagged tiger sharks made dives to at least 250 meters, and one reached 828 meters.

To age tiger sharks off eastern Australia, scientists counted growth bands in 202 thin sections of vertebrae from 112 females. In the wild, the average lifespan of a tiger shark is 27 years, though some may live to 50. A tiger shark matures at about 7 to 10 years old, when it is about 10 feet long, and tiger sharks grow quite slowly, which makes them vulnerable to population declines from overfishing. An adult tiger shark is commonly 325 to 425 centimeters (10 to 14 feet) long and commonly weighs 385 to 635 kilograms (850 to 1,400 pounds). As of November 2026, some tiger sharks have been recorded at 550 centimeters (18 feet) long. A mother tiger shark gives birth to live young, called pups, and a newborn pup is about 51 to 76 centimeters (1 to 1.5 feet) long.

What do tiger sharks eat? Scientists found out by looking in their stomachs. Stomach contents from 628 tiger sharks with food in their stomachs off South Africa showed that reptiles, birds and large sharks became more important in the diet as the sharks grew. In the Galapagos, green sea turtles were the main prey of large tiger sharks over 280 centimeters, while smaller sharks mainly ate squid and pelagic fish. Tiger sharks eat many different kinds of food, and they may have the most varied diet of any shark. Their food includes sea turtles and birds, and they are scavengers as well as hunters. They hunt mostly at night, and at night they often move into shallow water to feed.

Scientists use satellite tags to track the movements of tiger sharks. Adult male tiger sharks tracked in the northwest Atlantic spent winters near Caribbean coral reefs and summers in other ocean areas, returning to the same islands, and they made round-trip migrations of over 7,500 kilometers every year. Smaller, immature tiger sharks migrated less than adult males. Tiger sharks tracked in the western North Atlantic typically stayed within a narrow daily temperature range of about 2 degrees Celsius. Scientists studied 96 tiger sharks around Hawaii that carried satellite or acoustic tags, and most satellite location estimates were in coastal waters less than 500 meters deep. Tiger sharks tagged around Hawaii sometimes ranged about 1,400 kilometers offshore.

Movement data from tiger sharks helped scientists map and check the size of the seagrass meadows of the Bahamas Banks. As of November 2026, the Bahamas Banks hold at least 66,000 and up to 92,000 square kilometers of seagrass, the world's largest seagrass ecosystem. In the Galapagos Marine Reserve, 93 percent of the satellite-tracked time of tiger sharks was spent inside the reserve. Large tiger sharks over 200 cm concentrated their movements in front of the two main green sea turtle nesting beaches, visiting them daily at night. Tiger sharks generally prefer murky water near the coast. They live in tropical and temperate seas around the world.

Words to know

• vertebrae: backbone parts
• immature: not grown up
• juveniles: young ones
• seagrass: sea meadow plant
• pelagic: open-sea