Uniform blood-red with white antennae, working stations back inside overhangs.
A cleaner shrimp to about 6 cm, deep blood-red over the whole body, with long white antennae that usually show before the animal does, white tips to the walking legs, and a scatter of small white spots over the head and the front of the carapace. The colour is otherwise uniform, and the absence of a white dorsal stripe is what separates it at a glance from Lysmata amboinensis, which shares the habit and often the same overhang. The hingebeak shrimps, Rhynchocinetes durbanensis, are also red but are patterned in fine white lines and carry a rostrum that hinges upward.
It works cleaning stations under ledges, in crevices and on cave roofs, commonly hanging upside down from the rock, and it stays back in shadow rather than coming out onto open reef, which is why it is seen less often than its abundance would suggest. Client fish come to it. Like other Lysmata it is a simultaneous hermaphrodite and is usually found in twos.
Recorded from about 5 to 40 m through the central Indo-Pacific. It is a high-value aquarium species and is collected commercially in parts of the region, which is worth knowing before reading anything into how many are on a given site.
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.