Wraps itself around a single whip coral and matches it, ridge for ridge.
A small spider crab to about 2 cm with a triangular carapace drawn out into a long pointed rostrum and a body ridged and tuberculate along its length. Colour follows the host — white, cream, yellow, orange or maroon — and the ridges continue the line of the whip coral’s own texture, so the crab reads as a swelling on the stem rather than as an animal sitting on it.
Lives on whip corals of the genus Cirrhipathes and on gorgonians, gripping the stem with the rear legs and holding the body flat along it, usually with the rostrum pointing up the whip. Singly or as a pair. The same whips carry Pontonides shrimps and Bryaninops gobies, and a productive whip is worth working from base to tip. Recorded from about 10 to 40 m. Like the shrimps it edges round to the far side of the stem when approached, and like them the answer is to circle slowly rather than to reach.
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.
