A transparent shrimp barely 1.5 cm (0.6 in), banded to match the polyps of the whip coral it lives on, pressed flat against the stem. Pairs hold one whip and stay on it, which means the search is not for the shrimp but for the coral.
The copy is exact and specific. Individuals on a white-polyped whip are banded white; those on an orange one are orange - the shrimp matches its own host rather than the species in general, and a pair moved to a different colony would be conspicuous.
It feeds on plankton taken from the water passing the whip and on mucus from the host, and it moves along the stem in short runs, always keeping the coral between itself and whatever is watching - which is why photographs of it are usually taken by someone rotating slowly around a whip while the shrimp rotates the other way.
It was described in 2008, which is recent for an animal on reefs this heavily dived, and it is a fair illustration of what macro photography has done for taxonomy: several of these tiny commensals were found by photographers before biologists.
- transparent shrimp banded to match the polyps of the whip it sits on
- body pressed flat against the stem, usually a pair to a whip
- hard to see until it moves along the stem
- length up to 1.5 cm
