very small shrimp ID

Hello All

i was hoping to get an ID on this critter . i found him this evening on a dive at Jervis Bay Australia, depth 8m , temp 21c on sandy botton , he was floating around and stoping from time to time , i have never seen one of these before and i really like looking for our local small critters. onece i got the photos home i could see that he probally was some sort of shrimp. as you can see by the grains of sand he is very small probally around 5mm

this shot is a 30%crop

regards

Matt

Unless it's a juvenile of some shrimp species, it looks quite a bit like Dasycaris ceratops in Debelius' Crustaceans of the World. The other possibility may be Dasycaris Symbiotes. Both species are associated with sea pens.

However, the range may be off, as it is an Indo-pacific critter. Perhaps a related species?

Cheers,

Marli

This must be a new one for you Marli. It's an odd little mysid that's quite unlike the unusual stream-lined mysid shape. The genus I know that's like this is Idiomysis. There's one species described from Australia - Idiomysis inerrmis - but it may be that they are overlooked because they're so small. Matt -- that's an absolutely outstanding image, the very best I've seen. \Would you mind if I downloaded it for my files?

This must be a new one for you Marli. It's an odd little mysid that's quite unlike the unusual stream-lined mysid shape. The genus I know that's like this is Idiomysis. There's one species described from Australia - Idiomysis inerrmis - but it may be that they are overlooked because they're so small. Matt -- that's an absolutely outstanding image, the very best I've seen. \Would you mind if I downloaded it for my files?

Thanks for the critter ID marli and leslie ,

thanks for your kind words leslie , yep it would be ok for you to download the image and thanks for asking . i do have some other images taken at different angles but this image is probally the best .at first i thought it might be some sort of tiny sea horse or pipefish , it was so small that to the naked eye all i could see was an unusual little blip with a strange movement .

Thanks guys

Matt

thanks Matt. Incidentally, I didn't mean to imply that your animal is Idiomysis inermes since I don't know enough to know! Just that it's similar.