New red shrimp found in the deep sea near Hokkaido

Aquamarine Fukushima, an aquarium^*1 in Japan, has announced a new kind of shrimp. The shrimp is bright red. It lives in the deep sea of the Nemuro Strait, a part of the sea in the east of Hokkaido. Hokkaido is an island in the north of Japan. The new shrimp is called homuraibaramoebi^*2.

For the past 20 years, the aquarium has been collecting animals from the deep sea in the Nemuro Strait. Local fishermen have helped with this work. The team uses shrimp traps and gill nets^*3, the same tools that fishermen use. Over the years, they have found many interesting shrimp and crabs.

In 2019 and 2022, the team collected some shrimp from a group called ibaramoebi^*4. They looked closely at the shape of the shrimp and at their genes^*5. Two of the shrimp did not match any known kind of shrimp. The aquarium then studied these two shrimp together with Dr. Tomoyuki Komai of the Chiba Prefectural Central Museum, a museum in Chiba, Japan. After this work, the shrimp was announced as a new kind.

1. *1 aquarium: a place where people can see fish and other water animals in big glass tanks
2. *2 homuraibaramoebi: the Japanese name of the new red shrimp
3. *3 gill nets: nets that stand in the water like a wall and catch fish that swim into them
4. *4 ibaramoebi: the Japanese name of a group of shrimp that look alike
5. *5 genes: the tiny parts inside a living thing that make it what it is and that it gets from its parents