Little is known about the biology of this species.  Live sightings come from scattered locations, mainly in deep, oceanic waters in the tropical and subtropical Indo-Pacific, in areas with surface water temperatures of 21-31°C. Dive times of up to 33 min have been recorded (Anderson et al. 2006). School sizes tend to be large and may vary regionally: reported mean school sizes range from 7.2 (western Indian Ocean) to 29.2 (western Pacific), with individual groups ranging from 1-100 individuals (Pitman et al. 1999, Anderson et al. 2006).  Stomach contents of single animals stranded in Japan (Yatabe et al. 2010) and the Philippines (Yamada et al. 2012) contained beaks of various mid-water squids.

The distribution is not fully known, but these whales apparently range throughout the tropical Indo-Pacific region (i.e., eastern Pacific to western Indian Ocean; Dalebout et al. 2003, Anderson et al. 2006, Jefferson et al. 2015) and in the southern Bay of Bengal (Afsal et al. 2009). They were rarely seen in the eastern tropical Pacific during systematic large-scale surveys (Hamilton et al. 2009), and may be more common in the western Pacific (Pitman et al. 1999). They also appear to be relatively common in the western Indian Ocean, especially around the Maldives (Anderson et al. 2006). Stranded specimens are known from tropical and warm-temperate waters of Australia, Somalia, South Africa, the Maldives, Kenya, India, Myanmar, New Caledonia, the Philippines, China, Taiwan, Japan and Hawaii.

The species is listed in Appendix II of CITES. Research is needed to determine the impacts of potential threatening processes on this species.