A near-transparent cleaner shrimp on anemones and mushroom corals, marked with fine white bars.
A slender palaemonid shrimp to about 3 cm, the body almost completely transparent and carrying a series of narrow white to pale violet bars across the back and abdomen, with small white spots on the tail fan and violet to purple joints on the walking legs. The transparency is the first character: against a host tentacle the animal reads as an outline and a set of marks rather than as a body.
The likely confusion is with two shrimps on the same hosts. Ancylocaris brevicarpalis, the glass anemone shrimp, is stouter and carries large solid white patches on the back and four or five round orange spots ringed in black on the tail fan. Periclimenes venustus is more strongly marked with brown and white and has a longer rostrum. The name to expect in older literature is Periclimenes holthuisi.
Hosts are broad for a commensal shrimp and include several large anemones, mushroom corals and occasionally jellyfish, and animals are usually in pairs or small groups near the base of the tentacles rather than out on them. They clean, and a shrimp that is working will leave the host briefly to meet a fish that has stopped above it. Recorded from about 3 to 30 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.