Boldly banded and rarely more than 15 mm, on rubble and sponge.
Small, to about 1.5 cm, and rare enough in the water that most divers meet it once. White to cream with bold dark transverse bands, orange-red highlights and long spines on the carapace and rostrum. Like the harlequin shrimp it has flattened, expanded second chelipeds and leaf-like antennules, which is why the two are confused. Four things separate them: this one is banded where the harlequin is blotched, markedly spiny where the harlequin is smooth, roughly a third the length, and its eyestalks carry a projecting horn — the species name means horned eye.
Correct a common error here. Because it resembles a small harlequin shrimp it is routinely described in dive material as a sea star eater. The published position is brittle stars: a 2025 paper is titled outright to say so, and the aquarium literature agrees that it appears to take ophiuroids generally. Feeding on sea stars rests on one unpublished captive observation. Like the harlequin it is usually found as a male-female pair. Nocturnal and cryptic, on rocky and rubble reef between about 6 and 20 m, from the Maldives east through Indonesia and the Philippines to the Great Barrier Reef, New Caledonia and Japan. Some of its reputation for rarity is probably a matter of when people look.
A second species, the simplex shrimp Phyllognathia simplex, occurs across the same range and is recorded from these destinations. It is not separable from this one in a photograph on any character that has been published, so a shrimp of this kind seen here is best recorded as Phyllognathia unless the identification comes from someone who has examined it.
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.