Smaller than the banded coral shrimp, with a blue-violet body and banding only on the claws and tail.
A stenopodid shrimp to about 3 cm in the body, blue to violet over the carapace and abdomen, with red and white banding confined to the enlarged third pair of legs and to the tail fan. The antennae are long and white. It is smaller than Stenopus hispidus and the colour separates the two without difficulty, since in the banded coral shrimp the red bands cross the whole body.
It lives in pairs in holes, under ledges and in sponges, and it cleans, though it is visited by fish less often than the larger cleaner shrimps. On these coasts it belongs to the harder sections of a site rather than to open sediment, and it turns up on rubble slopes, on walls and around structure. Recorded from about 5 to 35 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.
