Rainbow Vampire Crab

Buy a Rainbow Vampire Crab only if you already run, or are ready to build, a humid paludarium with a tight lid, a real land area and a water section the crab can climb into and fully enter. If you were hoping to add a crab to a flooded shrimp or fish tank, this isn’t the animal for it.

The Rainbow Vampire Crab is a semi-terrestrial Geosesarma. You’ll also see it sold as “Rouxi”, but trade names in this genus are unreliable, so we name ours only as a Geosesarma species until its identity is confirmed. Everything in our catalog is bred or propagated in our own tanks rather than collected from the wild. You choose Male or Female on this page, so you can plan the group you want. We don’t promise breeding or the number of young from any order.

Paludarium conditions a Rainbow Vampire Crab needs

Keep the enclosure warm, humid and mostly land, with water the crab can reach from the bank. The numbers below are the range we keep to for vampire crabs.

Dry air is the usual way these crabs are lost, so treat humidity as the harder half of the job. Temperature is easy to hold with a heater; humidity takes a lid that actually stays shut.

Check your setup before you order a Rainbow Vampire Crab

Tick every line before checkout. If one fails, fix it first; the crab will still be available.

• The paludarium has been running and humid for a while, not set up the week the box arrives.
• The lid closes with no gaps, and cable and tubing holes are sealed.
• The water section has a slope, rocks or roots the crab can walk down and back up.
• You can hold about 78°F (26°C) without swings.
• You have a way to see humidity, such as a gauge, instead of guessing.
• You’ve confirmed your own import rules.

Confirming your own import rules is part of ordering. We cannot tell you that live freshwater invertebrates are legal to import where you live.

Which tank mates suit a Rainbow Vampire Crab?

Shrimp or small, peaceful fish in the water section can work. Other vampire crabs don’t, so give this line an enclosure of its own.

In our paludariums, the Rainbow Vampire Crab is more aggressive than our other vampire crab lines and tends to attack crabs of other lines. Keep it away from Tomato, White-handed or any other vampire crab. Mixing lines carries a second risk too: two Geosesarma that look alike aren’t necessarily the same species.

At Shrimp Aquatics, we keep Neocaridina shrimp in the water section of our vampire crab paludariums. They breed there, and the young grow up normally; the crabs rarely manage to catch them. We keep only small, peaceful fish with our crabs. An aggressive fish can eat a crab, or harass one that has come down into the water to molt, and a molt that is disturbed can fail.

If you add Neocaridina, keep the water inside their own range of 65-78°F (18-26°C). Where that meets the crab’s range, 72-78°F (22-26°C) suits both. Rarely isn’t never, so don’t count on every shrimp surviving.

Settling a Rainbow Vampire Crab in on arrival day

Have the paludarium humid and settled before delivery, then follow the instructions packed with your order. Open the box in a quiet room with the lights low, and let the crab walk into cover on its own instead of placing it.

Skip feeding on the first day. After that, offer small portions of a varied diet and lift anything uneaten before it molds, because leftovers spoil fast in a humid tank.

Film the unboxing from the sealed box. Livestock that arrives dead is replaced free of charge, counted from the first animal, when you report it within 2 hours of the carrier’s delivery time with an uncut unboxing video. The live arrival guarantee sets out the rest.