[5] Manning named the specific epithet after Raoul R. Derijard, who had assembled the collection of specimens while he was working at the Station Marine de Tuléar.

[4] In 1995, Manning suggested A. multispinosa and A. manningi could be junior synonyms of A. derijardi writing he could "find no characters to separate" them; he included them in his synonymy list prefixed with a question mark.

[8] The Indonesian marine biologist Mohammad Kassim Moosa also listed these two species as question mark–tagged synonyms in a 2000 checklist.

[10][11][12] Ahyong later included some specimens he had previously identified as A. derijardi as in fact belonging to a new, separate species: A.

[11] A. derijardi is found throughout the Indo-West Pacific:[13] its range extends from Madagascar and the Red Sea to Australia, New Caledonia and Taiwan.

[2] The Dutch carcinologist Lipke Holthuis recorded a specimen of A. derijardi collected from the Gulf of Aqaba at the northern tip of the Red Sea in 1975 marking one of the extremes of the species's range.

[15] Ayhong has documented this species on Big Sister's Island in Singapore,[14] and Tweedie's misidentified specimen was from Sandakan, now in Malaysia.