Dragon shrimp

A pandalid shrimp of about 10 to 12 mm, shaped unlike anything else on a black coral. The back is drawn up into a pronounced hump and carries a row of long recurved dorsal spines, the rostrum is long and toothed, the legs end in strong hooks, and the body is translucent yellow-brown to pinkish with darker marks that follow the polyp spacing of the host. Two other shrimps live on the same stems and are the ones it is confused with. The whip coral shrimp Pontonides ankeri is smooth and barrel-bodied with spiral banding. The Zanzibar whip coral shrimp Dasycaris zanzibarica is bristled and humpbacked but stouter, roughly twice the length, and without the row of hooked spines along the back. Hooks, an exaggerated hump and a body under 15 mm together are enough.

It lives on antipatharians: the unbranched wire corals of the genus Cirrhipathes and the branched black corals Antipathes and their relatives, both of which have entries here. The shrimp sits astride the stem with the body aligned along the axis rather than across it, and the hooked legs hold it in place through surge. Colour follows the host closely enough that the animal reads as a kink in the stem. Like the other wire coral associates it rotates to the far side when a light comes onto it, so one that has just disappeared has usually turned through half a revolution rather than left. Working along a stem with a torch, from the base upward, is how they are found, and records are generally of single animals or of a pair on one stem.

The record is thin. Miropandalus hardingi was described in 1983 and is reported from scattered localities across the western Pacific. Most photographs come from a handful of muck destinations, which probably says as much about where people look closely at black coral as it does about the range of the animal.