Channels of the Hawaiian Islands 7 miles. ʻAlalākeiki means "crying baby." The Kealaikahiki Channel is the channel between Lānaʻi and Kahoʻolawe. It literally means "the road to Tahiti"; if one takes a bearing off of Kealaikahiki Point on Kahoʻolawe while in the channel and heads directly straight, one arrives, more or less, in Tahiti. In practice, however, Polynesian navigators probably did not quite ply a straight route to Tahiti. The channel is 17 miles wide. The ʻAuʻau Channel is one of the most protected areas of ocean in the Hawaiian Islands, lying between Lānaʻi and Maui. The channel is also protected by Molokaʻi to the
Hawaiian coot of the species had been meet. The delisting/downlisting criteria include protection and management of core and supporting wetlands, a population size greater than 2000 birds for five consecutive years, and multiple self-sustaining populations throughout the Hawaiian Islands. The first reference to a coot in the Hawaiian Islands was by Andrew Bloxam, who encountered the Hawaiian coot but failed to collect a specimen as he mistook it for the Eurasian coot, "Fulica atra", while in the islands in 1825 as the naturalist on board the HMS "Blonde". It is now considered either to be a separate species, "Fulica alai", or a