A shrimp cannot grow inside its shell, so periodically it has to leave it, and the operation is more drastic than it looks.
The shell being shed is not just the outside. It includes the lining of the gut, the covering of the gills, and the transparent surface of every facet of both eyes, all of which come away as one connected piece that the animal backs out of. What emerges is soft, pale and completely defenseless: the new shell takes hours to harden, and during that window the shrimp can neither snap, run properly nor hold anything. That is why it happens in the deepest crevice the animal can find, and why an empty shrimp shell lying in a cave looks so convincingly like a dead shrimp.
Molting also sets the calendar for everything else. A female can only be mated in the short period right after she sheds, which is what all the shoving between males is about, and it is when the previous clutch has to have hatched.
By day this one is packed into a crevice with others. After dark it comes out over the reef, wavy red on pale, with a red-tipped snout.
- wavy red pattern over a pale body
- red tip to the rostrum
- in crevices and under ledges by day, out over the reef after dark
- up to 3 cm
