Thor shrimp pair living under an anemone pic and my usual essay,lol.

These little guys are as common as mud in local waters where the salinity remains constant with temps above 18c with low to weak swell actions, and that doesn’t happen much this side of Moreton bay.
In the past say from 15 to 20 years back, the open ocean temps out off here usually bottomed out at 16c at Flinders and flat rock reefs and thermo clines below 80 feet and could get as low as 12c with in shore reefs and estuaries and some times got down to 14c and lower.
So back then, near nothing of any quality regarding reef aquarium fish and mobile inverts made it all the way through winter!
In SEQ these days constant salinity let alone clear water is not all that common because of rain events, especially the last three warmer parts of each of the last 3 years, excluding this year of course, so far lol. For most inverts to survive, salinity from 1.022 to 1.026 is required all year round to build quite substantial numbers of these to choose yours from, so these days they are only common in some areas!
Rain falls greater then 100 mill in a 24 hour time span for any particular area will kill near all marine life. Then onto dirty waters from up north which harms a great deal of life down here that comes from heavy rain from anywhere above us in Q will make contact as it goes out to sea with the east auzy current and arrive here as dirty waters while the phytoplankton works hard to process much of this organic matter, that is dirty water. What the phyto works on also includes many toxins like oil spills,etc, etc and most of earths carbon dioxide. But these little guys don’t do overly well till the waters get further south to cooler temps, then the real work by marine algae/phytoplankton and cyano gets into it and then that water now purified of crap, circulates out from way down south and up it goes, still in the pacific and heats and then back down here again. Some of this mix heads off to Mexico at times, but over all that’s the cycle
The sunshine coast dirty water from heavy rain takes some days to a week or so to get here and soup up our waters and massive rains from up Cairns way usually takes from several weeks, “depending on the east auzy currents activities at the time”, up to two months to get here as dirty water but not so dirty the further it comes from, because it gets a little processing done along the way.
Each year now for three years, what comes to us as planktonic life, as do near all marine life forms, even marlin and of course all corals, suffered severe losses. Also most blends in with the plankton as a transparent planktonic sized life forms. At some stage of their planktonic life they will have to head down and find a home when they are attaining colours and are at risk of being seen now or sense the sounds of reefs or smell/sense an anemone and then they hit the deck where ever that may be, usually over sand, deep water, cold water or to warm of water or to far up estuaries and they die. A small percentage of these trillions and trillions, “to many to count in any way”, finds a home to grow and show them selves, more so from late Feb into April at the largest amounts, then less then one percent make it to adult hood. But so far no massive rains kill off this year? The rains in recent years have wiped out quite a lot of what lives and breeds close to shore and completely wipes out what starts their lives in the estuaries from 100 mill and up of rain with in a 24 hour time frame, so a sports diver with out much knowledge of pretty much anything oceanic which is fair enough, will see just the usual brackish species and the more hardy chaetodons like Guentheri, flavirostris, vagabundus and some crapy wrasse, etc,etc that can with stand quite a lot of what many others will just croak from and become masses of food for heaps of line fish waiting near the bar/entrance to the open ocean of each estuary or from bays. The estuaries are sometimes completely wiped out to just bare rocks, or left only with the more hardy and brackish species, to nothing at all. So some less knowledgeable marine biologists and some conned new divers and the regular no nothing divers that know everything,lol,will now most likely think, bloody collectors took it all!