In March and April 2012, Ingi Agnarsson, Greta Binford, and Alexander Sanchez organized an expedition to Cuba in order to collect material for a NSF funded project on Caribbean biogeography. When Ingi kindly invited me to participate on this trip I gladly accepted because Cuba had been on my wish list since 1999 when I first visited the island. On that previous trip, Abel Pérez and I had only had the chance to visit localities in western and central Cuba, and the agenda of the 2012 trip included several promising localities in the eastern part of the country.

The general emphasis of the collecting effort was on a fairly large number of arachnid taxa such as scorpions, pseudoscorpions, harvestmen, amblypygids, and various spider genera, including the pholcid genus Modisimus. Modisimus is known to be highly diverse in the Caribbean, with most or all island species endemic to the respective island, with a large number of undescribed species, and with strong ecological diversification. On Cuba we found Modisimus in several different microhabitats, with pronounced morphological and color differences among species in each of them. The photos below show some examples.