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 a ...

, 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

The eastern cay was the last natural habitat of the Bahamian Hutia, 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 sp ...

-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 n ...

. 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 {{Bahamas-geo-stub