Scarlet Gamba Prawn

• GeneralOne of the most expensive crustaceans on the market; its deep red is natural.
• Its intense red, so striking at the surface, is perfect camouflage hundreds of metres down: red light does not reach there, so the animal looks black.
• The females grow far larger than the males, so the biggest and most expensive specimens are almost always female.
• The Spanish name carabinero comes from its colour: a deep scarlet that recalled the red uniform of the Spanish carabineers.
• The size difference between the sexes is large: females reach 33.4 cm and males do not exceed 19.3.
• It was described in 1868 from specimens caught off Madeira.
• It is the target of deep trawl fisheries in several parts of the Atlantic. In Brazil, where the fleet moved onto the slope in 2002, it came to account for 88% of total shrimp production from those fisheries, concentrated between 700 and 750 m.

Skeleton type

Invertebrate - articulated calcareous exoskeleton (crustacean)

Habitat and environment

Deep slope bottoms (400-900 m)

Sources consulted: Wikipedia (es): Aristaeopsis edwardsiana · ScienceDirect (Hughes 1989) · Science Advances, How colonial animals evolve · Wikipedia, Zooid