Giraldo Alayón García, Cuba’s ‘spider man,’ died on Sept. 24
Founder’s Briefs: An occasional series where Mongabay founder Rhett Ayers Butler shares analysis, perspectives and story summaries. For much of the 20th century, Cuba’s spiders and scorpions received limited attention beyond specialist circles. Identifying them required careful research in museum collections and comparing them with descriptions published abroad. Giraldo Alayón García spent much…
Giraldo Alayón García, Cuba's renowned arachnologist, passed away on September 24. Dubbed "Spider Man," Alayón dedicated much of his career to documenting the island's spiders and scorpions. In his hometown of San Antonio de los Baños, he used Radio Ariguanabo to share his findings with a general audience. For nearly four decades, Alayón worked at Cuba's National Museum of Natural History, curating one of the Caribbean's most significant arachnological collections.
Under his leadership, the museum's arachnology department became a vital resource for researchers worldwide. In 1994, Alayón published a comprehensive list of Cuba's spiders, serving as a benchmark for subsequent studies. Over his four-decade career, he described approximately 95 species and genera, most of which were unique to Cuba.
His work extended beyond Cuba's borders, as he directed the Arachnological Project of Yucatán in Mexico from 1993 to 1995 and led an expedition to Navassa Island in 1999, where a new scorpion species, Cazierius alayoni, was named after him.
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