biRd POoP ISlAnDs Glorious Guano Goldmines !
biRd POoP ISlAnDs Glorious Guano Goldmines !
Poop has a special superpower ! It ’ s rich in the nutrients that plants need to grow . Almost all poop can be used as fertiliser to invigorate tired soils ; horse poop , cow poop , pig poop , human poop ( yes , really !) and even bird poop . Especially seabird poop .
PenGuinS , pElicAns And boobIeS
LOL ! You said boobies ! Ed
The word guano is a word from the indigenous Peruvian language – used by the Inca civilisation to mean ‘ dung used as fertiliser ’. In Peru , this was mostly seabird guano , gathered from local Pacific islands where guanay cormorants , Peruvian pelicans and boobies ( not funny ) nested . The desert coast of Peru is a dry region , with little rainfall , so seabird poop had been building up on rocky , coastal islands for thousands of years . By Humboldt ’ s time , that meant towers of poop soaring as high as twenty-storey buildings !
Yes , ‘ boobies ’ are birds , have a giggle and get it out of your system now .
Alexander von Humboldt was a German explorer who travelled through Spanish colonies in South America in the early 1800s . Humboldt found out that local farmers spread guano on their crop fields .
Hang on , what ’ s guano ? Ed
Humboldt sent a guano sample back to Europe . It proved to contain a huge amount of natural nitrogen , a major component of chlorophyll , which plants use for turning sunlight into energy .
The NutRienT cyCle
Seabird poop doesn ’ t just contain high quantities of nitrogen . It also has lots of phosphate , potassium and calcium , all essential nutrients that plants need to thrive . In natural Peruvian seabird ecosystems , the nutrient-rich guano slides back into the sea , attracting ocean plants , which attract krill , which attract fish and other small sea creatures , and seabirds , who squirt guano . When the guano is removed and spread onto other soils , crop plants grow more abundantly thanks to all those ocean-rich nutrients .
FUN FACT TRUMPET Scientists believe that guano poop can boost a reef ’ s fish stocks by around 48 per cent ! This combined with its use as fertiliser means that , economically speaking , guano poop is an industry that is worth around a billion dollars per year !
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