A new island emerging off the coast of Japan offers scientists a rare opportunity to study how life begins to colonize barren land — helped by rotting bird feces and hatchling vomit.
Researchers say bird waste will be the secret ingredient to kick-start nature’s grand experiment on what is a still active volcano that only poked its head above the waves in November 2013.
That speck of land, about 1,000km south of Tokyo, has grown to engulf its once larger neighbor, Nishinoshima, a part of Japan’s Ogasawara island chain known for the wealth and variety of its ecosystem.
Photo: AFP
The new Nishinoshima, which the Japan Coast Guard in February said is 2.46 square kilometers in size — roughly 9.5 times the area of Taipei’s Daan Forest Park — is currently almost all bare rock, formed from cooling lava.
However, scientists say it will one day be humming with plant — and possibly animal — life, as nature moves in to what is being called a “natural laboratory” on one of the latest bits of real estate in the Pacific Ocean.
“We biologists are very much focusing on the new island because we will be able to observe the starting point of evolutionary processes,” Tokyo Metropolitan University’s Ogasawara Research Committee head Naoki Kachi said.
After the volcanic activity calms down, “what will probably happen first will be the arrival of plants brought by ocean currents and attached to birds’ feet,” he said.
Those seabirds, who could use the remote rock as a temporary resting place, could eventually set up home there.
Their excreta — along with their dropped feathers, regurgitated bits of food and rotting corpses — will eventually form a nutrient-rich soil that offers fertile ground for seeds carried by the wind, or brought in the digestive systems of overflying birds.
“I am most interested in the effects of birds on the plants’ ecosystem — how their bodily wastes-turned-organic fertilizers enrich the vegetation and how their activities disturb it,” Kachi said.
The old Nishinoshima, measuring just 0.22 square kilometers, was home to bird colonies until the eruptions scared the creatures away. A small number have clung on to the only patch of the old island that is still visible, making their nests among ash-covered plants.
Japan, which sits at the junction of several tectonic plates, is home to more than 100 active volcanoes.
Scientists have no idea when Nishinoshima will stop spewing lava, but its expansion is being offset by erosion around the edges.
The island is expected to follow a route laid out by Surtsey, an island that emerged from the sea in 1963, about 30km from the coast of Iceland.
The UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) World Heritage spot is known globally as an outstanding example of a pristine natural laboratory where researchers have been able to trace the evolution of a habitat.
“Since they began studying the island in 1964, scientists have observed the arrival of seeds carried by ocean currents, the appearance of molds, bacteria and fungi, followed in 1965 by the first vascular plant,” UNESCO says on its Web site.
“By 2004, [vascular plants] numbered 60, together with 75 bryophytes, 71 lichens and 24 fungi. Eighty-nine species of birds have been recorded on Surtsey, 57 of which breed elsewhere in Iceland. The 141-hectare island is also home to 335 species of invertebrates.”
Not bad for somewhere that has only existed for a half-century.
Nishinoshima might not be quite as quick as Surtsey to establish itself as a teeming wildlife haven — it is a long way from mainland Japan and not too close to its neighbors in the Ogasawara island chain, which limits the number of species of birds and seeds that will make it that far.
Nonetheless, it is an exciting blank canvas and needs to be treated with respect — which means keeping out foreign invaders that would not naturally drift or fly in, Kachi said.
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