Ghost Shrimp

• Its twig-like outline and its habit of swaying with the current camouflage it completely among the hydroids where it lives.
• The females carry their eggs in a ventral pouch and look after the young for the first few days.
• It is called a skeleton shrimp for its thread-like, almost transparent body: it grips the substrate with its hind legs and stands upright, swaying in the current like a twig.
• That appearance is camouflage. On colonies of the soft coral known as dead man's fingers it reaches enormous densities and is mistaken for the polyps.
• The males are larger than the females and detect their pheromones with the antennae; once paired, the male rides on the female or holds her until she moults.
• In the North Sea it competes with the invasive Caprella mutica: the invader dominates on artificial and floating substrates and the native on fixed, deeper ones.

Skeleton type

Invertebrate - articulated calcareous exoskeleton (crustacean)

Habitat and environment

Hydroids, algae and bryozoans of the shallow subtidal

Sources consulted: Linneo (1767); Coolen et al. (2016); Telnes, Marine Fauna Gallery of Norway; ScienceDirect (Hughes 1989); Science Advances, How colonial animals evolve; Wikipedia, Zooid