Red-and-white bands, long white antennae, and a pair that holds one hole for life.
A shrimp about 6 cm in the body with antennae twice that again, white and translucent with broad red to red-brown bands across the carapace, the abdomen and the greatly enlarged third pair of legs, which end in slender spiny claws far bigger than anything else on the animal. The whole body is covered in short spines. In practice it is found by the antennae — two long white whips waving out of a hole, visible well before the shrimp is. Two congeners look similar and neither is banded the same way: Stenopus tenuirostris has a blue-violet body with the red and white bands confined to the claws and tail, and S. zanzibaricus is yellow over the body. The hinge-beak shrimps sometimes mistaken for it are streaked and spotted rather than banded and gather in loose groups under ledges rather than in pairs.
It is monogamous. A male and female hold one hole, ledge or piece of debris together, often for the life of the pair, and drive off other banded coral shrimps that approach; a solitary animal usually means the partner is out of sight rather than absent. On muck sites the hole is as often a tyre, a pipe, a wreck or a discarded fish trap as it is reef. It cleans, and morays and groupers will hold station for it, though it is a less committed cleaner than the white-banded cleaner shrimp and takes a good deal of its food by foraging on small invertebrates at night. Females carry a mass of green eggs beneath the abdomen.
It normally hangs upside down under an overhang, so photographing it means shooting upward into a dark space, and the white antennae are the part of the frame that blows out first. Recorded from the shallows to about 40 m.
Ratings are per location: 1 means found on most dives that look for it, 5 means a handful of records. Where enough dives have been logged the figure is calculated from them; otherwise it is an editorial estimate, and says so. We publish habitat and destination, not the dive site.
