In 1969, Australian pilot Don Adams landed on Lady Elliot Island, a tiny coral cay off the coast of Queensland. What followed was one of Australia’s longest environmental turnaround stories, and it is still unfolding more than 50 years later. There was barely any life on it. A subsequent peer-reviewed study of the island’s recovery published in the Australian Journal of Multi-Disciplinary Engineering described how the island had been almost completely bare after about a decade of guano mining in the 1800s. Adams looked at that wasteland and saw something worth saving.
Lady Elliot is not alone in this pattern. Their study predicted that bringing seabirds back could sharply increase nutrient-rich guano reaching nearby reefs , which in turn was linked to faster coral growth and higher fish biomass on those reefs. The researchers were not studying Lady Elliot Island itself, but their findings support the same basic idea seen there: restoring land-based nutrient cycles can ripple outward into the ocean.
Ecologist Ruth Dunn and her team at the University of Lancaster, writing in Conservation Biology in 2024, created models for what might happen if seabird colonies were restored in the Chagos Archipelago in the Indian Ocean.
