Stenopus tenuirostris
Long white antennae and banded claws on a tiny reef shrimp, uncommon but reliably logged across Sabah, Malaysia year-round.
Small enough to miss at a glance, with a slender body marked in bands of red-brown and white and a pair of oversized pincers held out front like boxing gloves. The giveaway is the pair of extremely long, white, whip-like antennae that sweep constantly ahead of it. It perches in the open on rock or coral rubble rather than hiding, usually in pairs, rocking side to side in a jerky motion that helps separate it from stiller look-alikes.
Divers usually find it sitting out in the open on rubble or low reef structure rather than deep in a crevice, often as a mated pair working close together. It reacts to a torch or a slow approach by waving those long antennae rather than bolting, though it will back off into a crack if you get too close too fast. Best looked for on slower, methodical passes over rubble and reef-base areas rather than mid-water cruising.
Like other members of the boxer shrimp family, it's thought to pair up for life and take on a cleaning role, picking parasites off fish that approach and hover for a service.
No clear seasonal pattern shows up in the sightings, and warm water in the 25.6 to 31.6 C range sits comfortably year-round in Sabah, so any month is fair game.
Reef neighbours a diver could mistake it for. Use the identification notes above to tell them apart.
Every logged sighting in the data comes from Sabah, Malaysia, making it the place to look for this one specifically. Within Sabah it turns up across a spread of sites rather than one signature spot, so it's more a case of checking rubble patches and reef crevices on any local dive than chasing a single named site.
Mapping where Blue Boxer Shrimp is logged…
All confirmed sightings come from Sabah, Malaysia, spread across a number of local dive sites rather than one famous location. It's worth searching rubble and reef-base sections on almost any Sabah dive.
There's no detected season in the sighting data, and Sabah's reef water stays warm year-round, so it can turn up on any dive in any month.
Look for a small shrimp with banded red-brown and white markings, oversized front pincers held out like boxing gloves, and unusually long white antennae that sweep constantly. It sits out in the open on rubble rather than tucked away.
It's logged as uncommon even at the sites where divers do find it, so it's not a guaranteed sighting. Slow, close-focus searching over rubble patches improves your odds.
Site and sighting data is aggregated from diver logs, iNaturalist and GBIF. For taxonomy and conservation status:
Freshwater Shrimp
2,168 sites
