 Based on morphology, Jack Garrick suggested in 1982 that the nervous shark is closely related to the blacktip reef shark ("C. melanopterus").Leonard Compagno in 1988 tentatively grouped these two species with the blacknose shark ("C. acronotus"), the copper shark ("C. brachyurus"), the silky shark ("C. falciformis"), and the night shark ("C. signatus").The close relationship between the nervous and blacktip reef sharks was upheld in a 1992 phylogenetic study by Shane Lavery, based on allozymes, and again in a 2011 study by Ximena Vélez-Zuazoa and Ingi Agnarsson, based on nuclear and mitochondrial genes.