A plain sandy prawn of open bottom, eight centimeters (3 in), spending the day buried and the night walking over sand and mud eating detritus. Nothing about it is decorative, and it is in this catalogue as a contrast.
Every other shrimp in this batch is a reef animal that lays a clutch of eggs, carries them under its body until they hatch, and produces young that settle almost immediately. Penaeid prawns do the opposite: they release eggs freely into the water, tens of thousands at a time, and the larvae go through a long series of stages drifting in the plankton before they settle. It is the strategy of an animal that lives on open bottom with nothing to guard.
That difference is also why penaeids are the prawns of the fishing industry and reef shrimps are not - a population that spawns in those numbers can be harvested, and a shrimp that guards fifty eggs under a ledge cannot.
Described from Egyptian waters, which is where the name comes from.
- typical prawn shape with a long toothed rostrum between the eyes
- sandy brown with fine speckling, translucent when fresh
- buried in sand by day, out over open bottom at night
- length up to 8 cm
