---
title: Brown Grass Shrimp (Leander tenuicornis)
scientific_name: Leander tenuicornis
common_name: Brown Grass Shrimp
taxon: Shrimps
published: 2024-11-28T16:55:40.938Z
updated: 2026-08-19T13:48:06.799Z
tags: Brown Grass Shrimp, Leander tenuicornis, Shrimps, Red Sea, Marine Life, Diving
url: https://redseacreatures.com/taxon/invertebrate/crustaceans/shrimps/brown-grass-shrimp
---

# Brown Grass Shrimp (*Leander tenuicornis*)

## Quick facts

- **Group:** Shrimps (*Caridea*)
- **Size:** 2.5 cm
- **Depth:** 1-71 m
- **Diet:** Omnivore
- **Activity:** Diurnal
- **Rarity:** Uncommon
- **Habitat:** Floating weed and seagrass, offshore and inshore
- **Reproduction:** Brooder

## How to recognise it

- slender brown to olive body matching weed
- long thin rostrum with fine teeth
- clings to floating algae rather than to the bottom
- up to 2.5 cm

It lives on things that are going somewhere.

Mats of torn seaweed and floating seagrass drift across open water for weeks, and they carry a full community with them: shrimp, crabs, small fish, juvenile turtles, snails and the animals that eat all of those. It is one of the few genuinely mobile habitats in the sea, and for the animals living on it the surrounding open ocean is a desert with a raft moving through it.

This shrimp is one of the residents, colored to match brown weed, slender and clinging. Where the raft goes, it goes, and mats crossing between coasts carry populations of shrimp and crabs to places their own swimming could never take them. That is how many coastal invertebrates got where they are.

It is also why the same species turns up in the top few meters and at seventy: the animal is not choosing a depth, it is choosing a piece of drifting weed, and the weed goes where the water takes it.

## Also known as

- **English:** brown glass shrimp, brown grass shrimp
- **French:** crevette à rostre étroit
- **Spanish:** Camarón de coral
- **Japanese:** マイヒメエビ
- **Chinese:** 細腳瘦蝦

## Scientific synonyms

- *Astacus locusta* Fabricius, 1781
- *Leander erraticus* Desmarest, 1849
- *Leander natator* H. Milne Edwards, 1837
- *Palaemon latirostris* De Haan, 1844
- *Palaemon mauritii* Spamer & Bogan, 1992
- *Palaemon mexicanus* Spamer & Bogan, 1992
- *Palaemon tenuicornis* Say, 1818
- *Palaemon torensis* Paulson, 1875
- *Palemon natator* H. Milne Edwards, 1837
- *Penaeus adspersus* Tilesius, 1819
- *Penaeus punctatissimus* Bosc, 1801

## Range

Anegada, Antigua and Barbuda, Caribbean Sea, Coral Sea, East Atlantic, FAO fishing area 34, FAO fishing area 47, Guana Island, Gulf of Mexico, Haiti, Indian Ocean, Indo-Pacific, Lesser Antilles, Mediterranean Sea, Mozambique, New Caledonian Exclusive Economic Zone, North Atlantic Ocean, Red Sea, Saint Thomas, Seychelles, South Africa, Southern Caribbean, Tortola, Venezuela, Virgin Gorda, West Atlantic

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*Source: [Red Sea Creatures](https://redseacreatures.com/taxon/invertebrate/crustaceans/shrimps/brown-grass-shrimp)*
*Updated: August 19, 2026*