Glass-bodied with electric blue joints, living only among the vesicles of bubble coral.
A shrimp of about 2 cm, the body clear glass with a faint lilac cast, marked at the leg joints and along the claws with bands of intense electric blue or purple. The transparency is close to complete, so what is visible on the coral is usually a set of blue joints and two black eyes. Nothing else lives on this host in this region, which makes identification a matter of finding the coral rather than examining the shrimp.
An obligate associate of bubble corals, Plerogyra and Physogyra, moving among the inflated vesicles the coral extends by day and unaffected by them. Usually a pair to a coral head. Recorded from about 5 to 30 m wherever the host grows, including on isolated heads on rubble slopes. The vesicles deflate when the coral is disturbed by light or contact, taking the shrimp’s cover with them, so the technique is to find the animal, back off, and let the coral reinflate before shooting rather than working closer.
Older references list it as Vir philippinensis.
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.
