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The butterflies of the Greater Antilles island of Hispaniola have in general been overlooked since Hall's 1925 summary, a situation Albert Schwartz remedies with this thoroughgoing study. Hispaniola, composed of Haiti and the Dominican Republic, paleogeographically the most interesting of the Antilles, has a topography so ideal for butterflies that nearly two hundred species live there, including sixty endemic species – more than on all the other islands combined. Schwartz's is the first major attempt to uncover the ecological and biogeographic reasons for this diversity.
The Butterflies of Hispaniola contains detailed information on natural history, ecology, taxonomy, elevational distribution, food plants used by adults, and seasonality, as well as occurrence on satellite islands. Schwartz accompanies his species accounts and analyses with photographs of selected ecologies and detailed distribution maps for each species, making this a reference for the general collector to areas that need further research. His descriptive keys, in Spanish and English, list 212 couplets. Besides its obvious value to lepidopterists, The Butterflies of Hispaniola will fill a need for students on any aspect of West Indian fauna.
Albert Schwartz, a professor emeritus of biology at Miami-Dade Community College, is an adjunct curator at the Florida Museum of Natural History and a research associate at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, the National Museum of Natural History, and the Museo Nacional de Historia Natural in Santo Domingo. He has written and coauthored numerous studies on Caribbean amphibians, reptiles, and Lepidoptera.
"A wealth of field data and ecological information [...] Schwartz knows the island and its butterflies better than anyone else alive [...] . The scholarship is beyond reproach."
– Lee D. Miller, curator, Allyn Museum of Entomology, Florida Museum of Natural History
