Brilliant golden-orange, most intense in large adults, this prawn looks like it belongs on a coral reef in bright sunlight. But it lives in the dark. The colour serves a purpose: at depth, red and orange light is absorbed by the water, so a golden prawn appears black. Invisible against the dark background. The brightness is not for display; it is for hiding. Between one hundred and five hundred metres depth, it lives. The golden prawn inhabits deep continental slopes and seamounts, preferring sandy and muddy bottoms with stable temperatures. It is found in the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific Oceans, and in New Zealand waters it is most common on the Chatham Rise and off the east coast of the South Island. During the day, it stays near the seafloor. Large aggregations of golden prawns gather on the muddy bottom, resting, waiting for night. They are vulnerable to predators – deep-sea fish, squid, and larger crustaceans – so they hide in the dark, relying on their camouflage. When disturbed, they flick their tails and shoot backward, disappearing into a cloud of sediment. Night brings them up. The golden prawn rises toward the surface, following the daily migration of zooplankton and small crustaceans. It ascends hundreds of metres in the dark, feeding as it goes. Its long, slender legs pick prey from the water column. Its delicate body is a graceful swimmer, moving backwards in rapid flicks of its tail. No one targets it. The golden prawn is not commercially fished in New Zealand. It is caught occasionally as bycatch in deep-sea trawl fisheries for hoki and oreo. The bycatch is not large, and the species is not considered threatened. Its golden colour makes it a striking specimen when it comes up in a trawl net, a flash of bright orange against the grey mud and fish. Moulting is a regular part of its life. The prawn sheds its old exoskeleton and inflates a new, soft one. It hides in the sediment until the new shell hardens. The old shell is eaten or breaks down. The prawn grows quickly – it reaches adult size within a year – and lives for only three to five years. The deep sea is not a desert. It is full of life, adapted to the dark, the cold, and the pressure. The golden prawn has found its niche on the continental slope, rising and falling with the light, feeding in the dark, hiding in a colour that is not golden at all when you are too deep to see the sun. For most people, it will never be seen. It lives too deep, too far from shore. But on the Chatham Rise, in the cold, dark water, the golden prawn gathers in its thousands, a hidden aggregation of bright-orange animals that appear black, waiting for night, rising to feed, living their short lives in the permanent twilight.