Red Clawed Crabs

[ADF Whisperer]

Red claw crabs are almost always wild caught, and they are semi aquatic crabs from brackish mongrove swamps. They absolutely must be able to dry themselves out or they will be miserable and in constant search for air access. If kept w/o air access, and even worse in freshwater, they will not live anywhere close to their full lifepsan.

[evilhorde]

I've only had a red clawed crab for a few months now but I feel that I can pass on a few thoughts on things I have seen.
My crab spends quite a bit of time out of the water. As best as I can tell, it spent three straight days out of the water once.
After my last re-scape I made some hiding places for the crab and now I hardly ever see the little bugger. When I get home from work, the crab is almost always out of the water but as soon as it sees me, it's back into the hole.
In the crab's tank (37 gallon) I also have cherry red shrimps, zebra danios and a male betta. The crab charges at the shrimps but has never caught one (that I have seen at least). I have never seen the crab go after a fish but the other day the betta was missing a chunk out of his rear fin. this may have been a crab attack or just a snag on an ornament.

Oh boy, it seems I'm a liar. I just fed the shrimps some algae wafers and I guess the crab is hungry because it just came running out. It charged the shrimps, took a swipe at the betta and then grabbed up a wafer and ran back to his hole. I've never seen the crab so frantic and aggressive before. Nobody got hurt, but the crab was running around like a madman attacking anything near 'his' wafers.