A heavy smooth crab, orange-red with pale markings, wedged under coral by day and out on the reef at night.
Carapace between about 8 and 15 cm across; the sources disagree by more than a fifth, so treat the figure as a range. Smooth and unarmed, brick to pale red with meandering white or yellow lines, and claw tips that darken with age.
The Caribbean king crab is the confusion and the surface settles it: spiny and knobbed there, entirely smooth here.
One to twenty metres on reef and rocky rubble. It is nocturnal and hides by day, so most sightings are on a night dive. It pinches hard if picked up. It is eaten in the West Indies.
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.
