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.