In
October and November 1999 I visited the pearl of the Caribic, invited by
my friend and colleague Abel Pérez González,
and financed by the American Museum of Natural History, New York. Our first
and most important goal was to collect a very unusual spider, one that
back in 1999 had no scientific name but that had attracted the attention
of Abel. It seemed to show extreme variation in the female genitalia, but
it is exactly the reproductive organs that usually show the lowest degrees
of variaton within species.
After
a few days in La Habana, this very unique city with its beautiful casco
viejo, we travelled west to Ceja de Francisco, a little village of
five houses in Rinar del Rio Province. Right near the village are the caves
where Abel had found 'our' pholcid, and after a couple of days we had a
large enough series to do a morphometric study. I also took with me a number
of alive females, in order to see if each female would produce offspring
of different morphs regardless of her own morph.
Other
sites we visited were Soroa National Park, Soledad (the type locality of
numerous spiders described by Elisabeth Bryant in the fourties), the Escambray
mountains (Topes de Collantes), and Cayo Caguanes. At the latter locality
we desperately tried to find the unkown males of Anopsicus silvai.
This is the largest Anopsicus and we suspected that it might not
even be an
Anopsicus at all (which is difficult to tell without
males). After hours of collecting we counted over 20 females but no male.
Even worse, back in La Habana we realized that three specimens were in
fact juvenile males. If we only had collected them alive!
Back
home (in New York at the time) I measured the spiders and reared
the juveniles from different females. It turned out that the females were
in fact dimorphic, an extremely rare phenomenon in arthropods, and that
the species belonged into a new genus we named Ciboneya.
Two main papers have resulted from this trip (Huber, B. A. & Pérez González, A. 2001a, 2001b), but a wealth of material is still waiting to be worked on.