First report on the herpetofauna of Ataúro Island, Timor Leste

Hinrich Kaiser; Zito Soares; Caitlin Sanchez; Sven Mecke; Scott Heacox; Andrew Kathriner; Luis Araujo; Agivedo Ribeiro; Mark O’Shea

doi:10.15560/9.4.752

Check List 9(4): 752-762, doi: 10.15560/9.4.752

First report on the herpetofauna of Ataúro Island, Timor Leste

Hinrich Kaiser^‡, Caitlin Sanchez^§, Scott Heacox^‡, Andrew Kathriner^|, Agivedo Varela Ribeiro^¶, Zito Afranio Soares^¶, Luis Lemos de Araujo^¶, Sven Mecke^#, Mark O’Shea^¤

‡ Department of Biology, Victor Valley College, United States of America§ Department of Biology, Victor Valley College., United States of America| Department of Biology, Villanova University, United States of America¶ Universidade Nacional Timor-Lorosa’e, Timor-Leste# Philipps-Universität Marburg, Germany¤ University of Wolverhampton, United Kingdom

Corresponding author: Hinrich Kaiser ( hinrich.kaiser@vvc.edu )

This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Citation: Kaiser H, Soares Z, Sanchez C, Mecke S, Heacox S, Kathriner A, Araujo L, Ribeiro A, O’Shea M (2013) First report on the herpetofauna of Ataúro Island, Timor Leste. Check List 9(4): 752-762. https://doi.org/10.15560/9.4.752

Abstract

We describe for the first time the terrestrial herpetofauna of Ataúro Island, Timor-Leste, a small mountainous island in the Inner Banda Arc of the Lesser Sunda Archipelago. The island supports a fauna of ten lizard species in three families (Gekkonidae, n = 5; Scincidae, n = 4; Varanidae, n = 1) and four snake species in three families (Colubridae, n = 3; Typhlopidae, n = 1; Viperidae, n = 1). In addition to a set of lizards (e.g., Cryptoblepharus, Eutropis, Gehyra, Gekko, Hemidactylus, Lamprolepis) and snakes (e.g., Lycodon, Ramphotyphlops, Trimeresurus) typical for the Lesser Sunda Islands, there appear to be undescribed endemic species of Cyrtodactylus, Eremiascincus, and Varanus on Ataúro. Our surveys to date have not revealed the presence of any amphibians, turtles, or crocodiles.

Keywords

Herpetology; diversity; lizards; snakes