Introduction
Puerto Rico is an island of the Greater Antilles comprising
~9100 km2, and located at 18.2° N,
66.6° W between the Virgin Islands and Hispaniola. The island
constitutes a small archipelago of over 125 islands and cays that are
geologically complex. About 28% of the terrain of the main island of
Puerto Rico is covered in limestone cliffs, valleys, and hills with a
dichotomy between mesic and xeric forests in the northern and southern
regions, respectively (Monroe 1976; Lugo et al. 2001). The heterogeneity
of Puerto Rico’s landscape and habitats harbor diverse vertebrate fauna,
especially in areas associated with forests and karst formations. Among
the focal taxa in this study, the diversity of this island includes a
total of 18 amphibians, 72
squamates (lizards and snakes) (Rivero 1998; Uetz et al. 2023) and 13
bats (Gannon et al. 2005). For the herpetofauna, about 60 species (43%)
are endemic to Puerto Rico; out of the bat species, 2 (15%) and 6
(46%) are locally endemic to Puerto Rico and regionally endemic to the
West Indies, respectively. The bats and herpetofauna of Puerto Rico are
continuously being studied and have served as models for studying
natural disaster effects on island ecosystems (Calderón-Acevedo et al.
2021), hybridization and sex chromosome research (Pinto et al. 2019,
2022), and niche partitioning genome-environmental association studies
(Wogan et al. 2020; Ingram et al. 2022). Nonetheless, distribution and
taxonomic accounts of these taxa in locally protected habitats and
preserves are generally lacking. Checklists at local and island-wide
scales for Puerto Rico are limited to algae (Ballantine and Aponte
1997), insects (Ramírez et al. 2020), birds (Arendt et al. 2015), and
arthropods (Vélez Jr. Jr. 1967; Pérez-Reyes et al. 2013; Ospina-Sánchez
et al. 2020), but are lacking for bats, squamates, and amphibians. The
need for more regional and up-to-date checklists in Puerto Rico is
important for biogeographic, evolutionary, and conservation studies, as
many taxa have restricted ranges and are isolated to regional caves
and/or forests (Rivero 1998; Kurta and Rodriguez-Durán 2005). Here, we
provide the first faunal checklist for Mata de Plátano Field Station and
Nature Reserve (collectively referred to as Mata de Plátano here), an
area in the north-central subtropical moist forests of Arecibo that
contains multiple caves, including Cueva de los Culebrones, a cave
system well-known for the predator-prey interactions between the endemic
boa (Chilabothrus inornatus ) and several bat species.