Animal Crossing Fish - Explained #180

Brought to you by a marine biologist and one well-dressed pair…

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Shrimp live adorable lives. There are so many different species that all do wildly different things with the same toolset - two claws and being super tiny. They live together in big groups, and, in some cases mate for life or become great friends with benefits. Either way, the social life of shrimps is an interesting one, especially for that of the Harlequin Shrimp.

Ah, yes, another Pocket Camp animal doomed to never return after it’s 4 days in the spotlight. This one was around just this January…maybe one day it will return?

Anyway, the Harlequin is a Crustacean, just like a great many of the fascinating animals we have covered in this ridiculous thing I’m doing here. (I’m so glad you all enjoy it~) As a review, Crustaceans are in Phylum Arthropods, meaning they have an exoskeleton that they shed in order to grow larger and they have joined legs. These include all manner of insects, spiders, and other creepy crawlies on land. In the ocean, we got Crustaceans. Within the SubPhylum Crustacea are thousands of species of familiar things, like crabs, lobsters, and shrimp, of course. However, those three crusties everyone knows all come from the Class (Malocostraca) and Order (Decapoda). Within Decapoda are finally the true shrimp of InfraOrder Caridea. Family Palaemonidae is next, which leads us to the Harlequin Shrimp, the only one in its Genus - Hymenocera.

By Steve Childs from Lancaster, UK - Flickr, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1770163

I know what you’re thinking - hold on, this one is blue! And that’s true! The Harlequin is named to species, though there is debate about whether or not the species could be split in two. I didn’t mean the rhyming shit, but I ended up really liking it. Moving on - the Harlequin comes in two varieties - the blue-around-brownish-spots guy like above from the West Pacific and Indian Ocean (sometimes named H. elegans) & a more yellow-on-pink-and-purple-spotted one from the Central and East Pacific that retains the species’ original name, H. picta.

By Elias Levy - Harlequin Shrimp, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=40577156

No matter what you call this tiny 2 in (5 cm) dude in the lab, he and his wife are dressed to kill out on the coral reef. Unlike many other shrimp species that may eat things tinier than they are or plants, this species goes after sea stars many times its own size, including the relatively massive Crown-of-Thorns that reaches 14 in (35 cm) across, aka seven times the Harlequin’s size. This shrimp doesn’t care, though. The male and female will work together to flip sea stars over and eat their tube feet, which very much cripples this otherwise monstrous, regenerating invertebrate from hell. As the saying goes, as bad as you are, there is always someone badder than you.

And there you have it! Fascinating stuff, no?