Nurse sharks are nocturnal animals, spending the day in large inactive groups of up to 40 individuals. Hidden under submerged ledges or in crevices within the reef, the Nurse sharks seem to prefer specific resting sites and will return to them each day after the nights hunting. By night, the sharks are largely solitary. Nurse sharks spend most of their time foraging through the bottom sediments in search of food. Their diet consists primarily of crustaceans, molluscs, truncates and other fish such as spiny lobsters, crabs, shrimps, sea urchins, octopuses, squid, marine snails and bivalves and in particularly, stingrays.

The Nurse Shark is a common inshore bottom-dwelling shark, found in tropical and subtropical waters on the continental and insular shelves. The Nurse Shark is frequently found at depths of one metre or less but may occur down to 12 metres. Its common habitats are reefs, channels between mangrove islands and sand flats. The Nurse Shark occurs in the Western Atlantic from Rhode Island down to southern Brazil, in the Eastern Atlantic from Cameroon to Gabon, in the Eastern Pacific from the southern Baja California to Peru and around the islands of the Caribbean.

Nurse sharks are thought to take advantage of dormant fish which would otherwise be too fast for the sharks to catch, although their small mouths limit the size of prey items, the sharks have large throat cavities which are used as a sort of bellows valve. In this way, Nurse Sharks can suck in their prey. Nurse sharks are also known to graze algae and coral.