The second Phyllognathia, banded like the tiger shrimp and not separable from it in a photograph.
Small, to about 1.5 cm, white to cream with bold dark transverse bands and orange-red highlights, on rubble and sponge at night. It is the second of the two Phyllognathia in this region and it looks like the first: the same flattened, expanded second chelipeds, the same leaf-like antennules, the same banding.
The two are separated on the spines of the carapace and rostrum and on the eyestalk, and no character that separates them has been published in a form a photograph can be read against. So a shrimp of this kind photographed here is Phyllognathia unless somebody who has examined it says otherwise. The records on this page are named simplex on the identification of the diver who took the pictures, and that is the whole basis for them.
Nocturnal and cryptic on rocky and rubble reef, usually found as a male-female pair, and like the tiger shrimp it takes brittle stars rather than sea stars. Recorded across the same range as its congener, from the Maldives east through Indonesia and the Philippines.
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.