Carries tufts of bristles over its back and comes out of the rubble after dark.
A robust shrimp to about 6 cm, mottled olive, brown and red with fine blue and white spotting over the head and legs, and with tufts of stiff bristles arranged in rows along the back and carapace. Males have greatly elongated first walking legs, longer than the body, which they hold out in front; females are stockier and more heavily bristled. Both sexes show a green sheen over the abdomen under a strong light.
Hides in rubble, under rock and inside dead coral through the day and comes out onto open surfaces after dark, which makes it a night-dive animal almost exclusively. It feeds on algae and detritus and is more active and faster-moving than most of the photogenic shrimps here. Recorded from the shallows to about 25 m. Colour under strobe light is markedly different from colour under a torch beam — the blue spotting comes up strongly on flash and is nearly invisible without it — which is worth knowing before deciding an animal on the sand is something else.
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.