The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service will reduce the number of acres designated as critical habitat in Maui, Hawaii, by about 25 percent compared to last year, leaving some 93,200 acres protected for 59 threatened and endangered species. In nearby Kaho’olawe, the agency will reduce critical habitat designations by 85 percent, to just 3,000 acres, all of them for the plant (get ready, non-Hawaiians) kohe malama malama o kanaloa, or Kanaloa Kahoolawensis, which cannot be found anywhere else in the world. The environmental organization Earthjustice, which successfully sued the agency in the past to force better protection of 255 Hawaiian endangered species, questioned whether the critical habitat designations would be sufficient to allow rare plants to recover from near-extinction.
