The Plana Cays are a group of two small uninhabited islands in the southern
Bahama Islands
The Bahamas (), officially the Commonwealth of The Bahamas, is an island country within the Lucayan Archipelago of the West Indies in the North Atlantic. It takes up 97% of the Lucayan Archipelago's land area and is home to 88% of the arch ...
, located east of
Acklins Island
Acklins is an island and district of the Bahamas.
It is one of a group of islands arranged along a large, shallow lagoon called the Bight of Acklins, of which the largest are Crooked Island () in the north and Acklins () in the southeast, and ...
and west of
Mayaguana Island.
![Acklins_and_Crooked_15ft_4p572_shaded](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f9/Acklins_and_Crooked_15ft_4p572_shaded.png)
The eastern cay was the last natural habitat of the
Bahamian Hutia
The Bahamian hutia or Ingraham's hutia (''Geocapromys ingrahami'') is a small, furry, rat-like mammal found only in the Bahamas. About the size of a rabbit, it lives in burrows in forests or shrubland, emerging at night to feed on leaves, fruit, ...
, a species of
rabbit
Rabbits, also known as bunnies or bunny rabbits, are small mammals in the family Leporidae (which also contains the hares) of the order Lagomorpha (which also contains the pikas). ''Oryctolagus cuniculus'' includes the European rabbit speci ...
-sized
rodent
Rodents (from Latin , 'to gnaw') are mammals of the order Rodentia (), which are characterized by a single pair of continuously growing incisors in each of the upper and lower jaws. About 40% of all mammal species are rodents. They are na ...
. It was thought to be extinct until 1966, when a population was found on the Plana Cays by biologist Garrett Clough. Hutias have since been transplanted from the Plana Cays to other parts of the Bahamas.
The Plana Cays have been suggested as the
first landfall of Christopher Columbus in the New World.
References
*
Uninhabited islands of the Bahamas
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