Cleaner shrimps, snapping shrimps and the commensals. Most of it is small - a good share of the entries are under two centimetres - and most of it is found on a host rather than on the ground.
The commensals are the bulk of the group. Shrimps live on sea cucumbers, sea stars, urchins, anemones, feather stars, whip corals and bubble coral, and most take the colour and the pattern of whatever they live on: the crinoid shrimp stripe for stripe with its feather star, the whip coral shrimp banded like the whip, the sea star shrimp changing over about a week if it is moved to a different host. Finding them is a matter of searching the host, which is why a guide will stop at a sea cucumber that looks like nothing at all.
The cleaners work from a fixed place and advertise it. A cleaning station is a crevice or an anemone that fish return to, and the shrimp will work on a hand held still in front of it. The snapping shrimps are heard far more often than seen: the crack carries across a dive, and most of the animals making it are inside a burrow shared with a shrimpgoby.
A few are night animals. The marbled and Donald Duck shrimps work the silt after dark, and the hairy shrimp, at about five millimetres, is normally found by a guide who already knows the patch of algae it is sitting in.
Every one has a page. They are shown as a list rather than as pictures because nothing has been photographed or logged for them yet, and a species with nothing behind it should not sit in front of one that has.
How many of the 38 carry a record at each destination. A species usually carries several, so these do not add up to 38.
All 1316 species in one index, with filters for destination, rarity and hazard.
