It is the most terrestrial of the Caribbean land crabs,[3] and is found from western Cuba across the Antilles as far east as Barbados.

It has been reported from Florida and Nicaragua, but few confirmed examples exist from the mainland; Loggerhead Key in the Dry Tortugas marks the northernmost limit of its island distribution, which extends across the Bahamas and Cuba, through the Greater and Lesser Antilles, to Barbados.

Outlying populations exist on Curaçao, in the Swan Islands off Honduras, Half Moon Caye of Belize, and the Archipelago of San Andrés, Providencia and Santa Catalina off the Colombian coast.

[6] After mating, mass migrations occur, with the females returning to the sea to release their fertilised eggs.

[10] They were first observed on Montserrat by Henry Guernsey Hubbard in 1894, and presented at a scientific meeting later that year (where the crab was misidentified as Cardisoma guanhumi), but no further research was conducted until 1955, when specimens were again collected, this time from Mona Island, and named as Drosophila carcinophila by M. R.

Chasing after crabs through a pitch-black jungle (growing on a razor-sharp labyrinthine limestone ground), while trying to aspirate flies from their carapaces is not trivial.

[7] Carl Linnaeus described the species in 1758 (the starting point for zoological nomenclature), noting the species' annual migrations from the forests to the coast (Habitat in America, sylvas vastissimis agminibus quotannis deserens littora maris petiturus: "lives in America; every year, an army marches out of the forests towards the sea").

[12] G. ruricola appeared on two African postage stamps for the International Year of the Ocean in 1998, under the name "mountain crab".