I’ve credited the fourth king of Greater Antillean anole taxonomy – Albert Schwartz – with describing eight Greater Antillean anole species. The period during which Schwartz’s career overlapped with Williams’s and that of the fifth yet-t0-be-revealed king were the glory years of Greater Antillean anole taxonomy. Over a little more than a decade in the late 1960s through the 1970s, these three figures described over 10 species, including some of the last new species discovered on Hispaniola and Jamaica. The activities of these three key figures were highly synergistic; Schwartz and Williams often contributed to one another’s work and divvied up projects to mutual benefit (even though they never described an anole species together) and Schwartz was a junior coauthor with the fifth king on several species descriptions.
After graduating with a PhD from the University of Michigan, Schwartz spent the majority of his academic career at Miami Dade Community College, an institution known more for its massive enrollment than for its faculty’s contributions to systematics. Early in his career, Schwartz worked primarily in Cuba, resulting in the description of three species, including two locally restricted species related to the Cuban crown-giant anole Anolis equestris (baracoae and smallwoodi) and a widespread trunk-ground species (jubar) that is the xeric forest counterpart to another widespread Cuban trunk-ground anole found primarily in mesic environments (homolechis). Schwartz would later devote his attention to Hispaniola, ultimately describing five species from both Haiti and the Dominican Republic. As was the case with Williams, many of the Hispaniola taxa that Schwartz described were unusual montane endemics (rimarum, fowleri, sheplani, and eugenegrahami).
Schwartz has been the subject of numerous insightful obituaries and remembrances, including a Copeia article by Duellman, Thomas and Henderson and several chapters in a Powell & Henderson edited volume dedicated to his memory. If one thing is clear, it is that Schwartz’s taxonomic contributions to the herpetology of the West Indies are without parallel and extend well beyond his work with Anolis: including anoles, Schwartz described 86 West Indian species, or 14% of the entire West Indian herpetofauna.
Schwartz viewed work in the field as critical component of his taxonomic work and was known to scoff at taxonomists from previous generations whose egregious taxonomic errors resulted from a lack of experience with organisms in nature (see E. D. Cope and Duméril and Bibron). In a fond remembrance of Schwartz and his contributions to West Indian herpetology, Schoener notes that most of Schwartz’s contributions were taxonomic in nature and characterized him as “a pure taxonomist, not a systematist in the modern or even older sense of the word, but a describer and identifier of taxa.” By this, Schoener presumably meant that Schwartz was not particularly interested in the use of numerical methods to reconstruct phylogenetic trees, debate about species concepts, or other topics that dominated the pages of premier systematics journals like Systematic Zoology (now Systematic Biology). Nevertheless, I believe that Schwartz’s work describing and identifying taxa lies at the very core of systematics (indeed, taxonomy is generally regarded as an important subdiscipline of systematics). Although his papers were focused primarily on taxonomy, Schwartz’s contributions also tended to include extensive remarks on topics ranging from biogeography to phylogenetic relationships to ecological interactions.
I’ll be posting more soon on some of Schwartz’s other contributions to anole systematics, and his prodigious efforts documenting geographic variation and subspecific variation in particular (Schwartz was a prodigious describer of subspecies and diagnosed more than 200 over his distinguished career).
Who knows who are fifth and final anole king is? Hint: Systematics was his second profession, having following time as a tennis pro that included first round exits from Wimbledon in 1959 and 1961 and the US Open in 1959.
- JMIH 2014: Early Records of Fossil Anolis from the Oligocene and Miocene of Florida, USA - August 13, 2014
- JMIH 2014: Relative Contribution of Genetic and Ecological Factors to Morphological Differentiation in Island Populations of Anolis sagrei - August 7, 2014
- JMIH 2014: The Ultrastructure of Spermatid Development within the Anole, Anolis sagrei - August 5, 2014
Robert Powell
Has to be Orlando Garrido, although I was unaware of his accomplishments in tennis.
Rich Glor
You can confirm by checking the brackets of the 1959 Wimbledon Championship at Wikipedia.
Robert Powell
The only time I ever met Orlando was years ago at Kansas, when he told me that he thought there were too many Anolis equestris in Florida for A. porcatus to become established. He said A. equestris eats porcatus like candy.
Peter Tolson
After so many years I was finally able to meet Orlando at the ISG meetings in Guanahacabibes. A true gentleman and a wonderful person.