One of our favourite sites around Sharm el-Sheikh is Shark’s Bay. At first glance it seems little more than a vast tundra of rocks and sand. On closer inspection though it has a lot to offer, especially if you enjoy macro. One of the most exciting discoveries we have made there recently is a small colony of urchin mantis shrimps. Admittedly we didn’t know what creature we’d stumbled upon until we’d compared our photos to others on the Internet but even before we were able to positively identify the shrimps, we knew we’d spotted something a little rare and unusual. The shrimp has a telson (in laymans terms, it’s arse) that resembles a rock-boring urchin which it blocks the entrance to its cavity (lair) to avoid detection (both from predators and divers). We only initially noticed the shrimps because one just happened to move whilst we were photographing the coral it inhabits. On the same day we saw an eagle ray which is enough to make most divers happy, yet this 30mm shrimp was the highlight of the dive.