A new animal every day

Today · Friday 6 November 2026

A long-legged crab so covered in orange sponge lumps and fuzzy debris that it looks like part of the brown coral.
Photo: portioid · CC BY 4.0 · iNaturalist

Picked by voters

Decorator crab

It dresses itself in bits of seaweed, sponge and other things it finds, attaching them to tiny hooked hairs on its body and legs.

Lives in
Coral reefRocky reefs and coral rubble of the Indo-Pacific, from East Africa to the western Pacific
More about the decorator crabScientific name, size and Red List status
Scientific name
Camposcia retusa
Size
Carapace up to 4.5 cm long
IUCN Red List
Not evaluated

The IUCN Red List has assessed 175,909 species. This one has not been assessed yet. What this means

Fact source: NParks Singapore

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This week

Every animal so far
  1. Mon 2American bison
  2. Tue 3Common midwife toad
  3. Wed 4Christmas tree worm
  4. Thu 5Dumbo octopus
  5. Fri 6Decorator crabToday
  6. Sat 7Tomorrow’s animalin 22 h 40 min
  7. Sun 8

Why Animall

People can’t care about animals they have never heard of.

Scientists still discover thousands of new animal species every year, while many others are disappearing because of habitat loss and climate change. Some die out before anyone has described them.

10,000+

new animal species are described every year.

University of Arizona, 2025

86%

of species on Earth, and 91% in the ocean, have not been described yet.

Mora et al., 2011

73%

average drop in monitored wildlife populations between 1970 and 2020.

WWF Living Planet Report, 2024