An undescribed Phycocaris, plain green and smooth where the hairy shrimp is furred.
Two or three millimetres, smaller than a grain of rice, and plain green. It is the same shape as the hairy shrimp and is found the same way, by someone who already knows where it is, but it carries none of the long branched setae that make that animal look like a scrap of turf: this one is smooth, and noticeably fatter in the body.
It lives among the small green and white colonial ascidians that grow on rubble and dead coral, and its colour is close enough to them that it is invisible until it moves. Recorded between about 10 and 20 m.
It has no scientific name. Olbert Tadete, a dive guide in the Lembeh Strait known as Aso, found the first one in October 2011, and it is still undescribed: whether it is a green form of Phycocaris simulans or a second species in the genus has not been settled, and settling it needs the animal in the hand rather than a photograph. Until it is, this page records it as Phycocaris sp. The name Phycocaris tadetei has been proposed informally for it, after the man who found it, but it has not been published.
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.