A variety of shrimp live throughout the reefs and once noticed, became my first underwater photography obsession. They come in all shapes, sizes and colors and hide in predictable homes including caves, anemones and/or soft coral. A challenge to photograph well, at least they don't swim away like fish do and may actually approach a hand holding a camera in an attempt to give it a nice cleaning.
Starting with the larger shrimp in the 1-2 inch size, the mantis shrimp titter rapidly around a hole and for some reason, their speed and manner always reminds me of a cockroach. They are extremely skittish and dash into a hole to check you out, eyeballs eerily following your every move.
Banded coral shrimp are abundant and not shy, also getting to be quite big up to 2 inches. The telltale sign long white antennae dangling out of a cave where they hide during the days and hang out, usually upside-down.
A cool find the other day was a 1.5 inch long arrow shrimp hanging onto soft coral in a strong current. It looked like a stick at first until closer approach the shrimp eyes, a long snout & tail and abdominal bump became apparent. A new personal discovery!
Colorful spotted cleaner shrimp live among the giant anemones. They wave you over by swinging their long white antennae to advertise a cleaning and often come swimming right out to you. These shrimp average around 1 inch in length.
The sun anemone shrimp are translucent and therefore hard to see, except for the fact that we know where they live since almost every sun anemone contains several. This is not entirely exclusive since I also found one in a patch of corralimorphs. These are often teeny, yet the bigger ones approach 1 inch, and you can locate them by looking for a pair of white eyes and bars on the claws.
Squat shrimp live in most types of anemones and wiggle their tails constantly as they perform a head-stand. They remind me of bumble bees with their brown bodies and yellow body saddles. They tend to be shy and are the smallest shrimp subjects at 1/4 to 3/4 inches - how cute.
Reef shrimp remain a fascinating subject and a old favorite. There is always something new to see or learn even here, for example watching an eel getting a cleaning or finding a berried female shrimp. I even came across an empty carapace floating on a reef, apparently from a recent molting of a banded coral shrimp that I didn't realize took place, similar to other crustaceans.
