Nearly invisible, hovering in a loose cloud at the mouth of a hole and dancing for clients.
A slender, almost entirely transparent shrimp to about 4 cm, marked with scattered red and white bands on the legs and rostrum and two conspicuous white spots on the back of the abdomen. The body is clear enough that a group hovering in front of a dark hole reads as a set of floating red dashes.
Unlike most cleaner shrimps it does not sit on a surface. Groups of five to twenty hover in the water at the mouth of a crevice, and when a fish approaches they perform a rocking, side-to-side dance with the body raised — a signal that has been tested experimentally and shown to increase the chance of a client stopping. Hungrier shrimps dance more. The client presents, and the shrimps move onto it and work over the skin and gills. Recorded from about 3 to 30 m, on reef and equally on debris and jetty structure.
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.