March 5, 2020 — The Trump administration agreed Wednesday to determine by this summer whether it will extend federal wildlife protections to Hawaii’s cauliflower coral reef.
The agreement, filed in federal court in Honolulu, comes after the Center for Biological Diversity sued claiming the National Marine Fisheries Service fails to protect the coral under the Endangered Species Act.
In its federal complaint, the conservation group said Hawaii’s cauliflower coral has been devastated by ocean warming.
Warming oceans have caused widespread bleaching of the coral, whose populations declined by 36% between 1999 and 2012, according to the conservation group. A global coral-bleaching between 2014 and 2017 killed millions of coral on hundreds of reefs from Hawaii to the Great Barrier Reef off the coast of Australia.