 The harmless nervous shark is caught incidentally by coastal gillnet fisheries and perhaps also by line and trawl fisheries.The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) lacks sufficient data to assess the conservation status of this species except in Australian waters, where its population seems healthy and has been listed under Least Concern.Australian ichthyologist Gilbert Percy Whitley originally described the nervous shark as a subspecies of "Galeolamna greyi" (a junior synonym of "Carcharhinus obscurus", the dusky shark), in a 1945 issue of the scientific journal "Australian Zoologist".