Example 4b

All images copyright protected, © Doug Segar and Elaine Stamman Segar.

This creature is not so strange after all. It is a small shrimp Periclimenes sp. (probably Periclimenes tenuipes). The shrimp's body and claw arms (called chelipeds) are almost transparent. In this enlargement of the previous image you can see that the small object seen in the middle of the previous image is the shrimp's eyes and part of its head. The body, barely detectable in the previous image, stretches out to the left. It can be seen in this enlargement by the lines that run along either side of its body and by the blurring of the sand seen through the rest of its body. Also, barely detectable are the shrimp's claws. OK, so you can see the purplish color of the claws at the ends of the pointer arrows, but where are the rest of the chelipeds? I'll give you a clue. They are thin and transparent but they do have small blotches of orange or purplish color at several locations along their length.

Undoubtedly the shrimp's camouflage is mostly for protection from predators. However, the camouflage, good though it is, is not enough. This shrimp also has a hiding place, in this case a hole in the sand beneath the edge of a coral head, into which it can rapidly retreat if threatened. Sometimes, instead of the hole, this species lives on an anemone within whose poisonous tentacles it can hide.