A flat, almost transparent sheet lying flush against the surface of a living soft coral, up to 3.2 cm (1.3 in) long and coloured like whatever it is sitting on. Nearly every diver who finds one files it as a flatworm, which is the single most misleading thing about the animal: this is a comb jelly, a member of a phylum with no close relatives among anything else on the reef.
Its swimming ancestors move on eight rows of beating combs. This one gave that up, flattened itself and took to crawling, keeping the two long tentacles that comb jellies hunt with. They are trailed out across the coral like fishing lines, studded with sticky cells rather than stinging ones, and reeled back in when something small blunders into them. Amphipods are the usual catch, and a feeding animal shows red where its prey shows through the transparent body.
The species was described in 2015 from Eilat, at the northern tip of this sea, which makes it one of the most recently named animals in the catalogue. Records are very few, and finding one is a matter of looking at the surface of a leather coral rather than at the water above it.
- flat translucent sheet lying flush on a soft coral, easily mistaken for a flatworm
- two long sticky tentacles trailed out and reeled back in
- body colour matches the coral it sits on
- length up to 3.2 cm
