Researchers say bird waste will be the secret ingredient to kickstart Mother 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, some 1,000 kilometres (620 miles) south of Tokyo, has grown to engulf its once larger neighbour, Nishinoshima, a part of Japan's Ogasawara island chain known for the wealth and variety of its ecosystem.
The new Nishinoshima, a respectable 2.46 square kilometres (0.95 square miles), the Japan Coast Guard said in February -- roughly the size of 345 football pitches -- is currently almost all bare rock, formed from cooling lava.
But 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'll be able to observe the starting point of evolutionary processes," said Naoki Kachi, professor and leader of Tokyo Metropolitan University's Ogasawara Research Committee.
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 fertilisers enrich the vegetation and how their activities disturb it," Kachi told AFP.
The old Nishinoshima, measuring just 0.22 square kilometres, 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.