Get Outta My Space!

Brock's Urchin Shrimp: Allopontonia brockii

This is Brock's Urchin Shrimp, Allopontonia brockii. They live on urchins, usually fire urchins; like their distant cousins the Coleman's shrimp. Unlike the Coleman's shrimp I've encountered, this fellow was defiant. He definitely wanted me to get away from this his home. After a little less than 10 minutes, I left.

This shrimp is often labeled "Brook's Urchin Shrimp," but that conflicts with the Latin species name, which means "of Brock". Allopontonia brockii was first described in the German journal Archiv für Naturgeschichte, in 1888, in an article entitled "Bericht über die von Herrn Dr. J. Brock im indischen Archipel gesammelten Decapoden und Stomatopode", or "Report on the Decapods and Stromatopods collected by Mr. Doctor J. Brock in the Indian Archipelago". At that time, it was assigned to the genus Anchistia.Brock must have employed locals, doing breath-hold diving and nets, to gather his specimens, during an arduous trek through modern Indonesia.

I'm sometimes reminded of the hero of H.G. Wells' The Time Machine, who comes upon the remains of a library in the distant future: "[T]he thing that struck me with keenest force was the enormous waste of labour to which this sombre wilderness of rotting paper testified. At the time I will confess that I thought chiefly of the philosophical transactions and my own seventeen papers upon physical optics".