Blame it on "guano mania." A craze for natural fertilizer made from bird droppings spurred the U.S. to take possession of a group of remote Pacific islands in the 19th century, and now those islands are home to the world's largest marine reserve.

On Thursday, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry announced an expansion of the Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument to cover nearly 490,000 square miles, six times larger than its previous size. (See "U.S. Creates Largest Protected Area in the World, 3X Larger Than California.")

The Guano Islands Act of 1856 made it possible. The United States long ago used the act to claim islands in the middle of the Pacific Ocean as territory, which means that today the U.S. government has the legal authority to protect waters up to 200 miles out from each island, an area known as the exclusive economic zone.

NG STAFF. SOURCE: U.S. GENERAL ACCOUNTING OFFICE

For the Pacific Remote Islands preserve, this includes Palmyra, an atoll of about 50 low-lying islands that were first claimed for the United States in 1859 under the Guano Islands federal statute, which remains on the books. In all, the law claimed five Pacific Remote Island Areas now in the reserve, including the triangular Kingman Reef and tiny Baker, Howland, and Jarvis Islands.

Ultimately, the islands of the newly expanded monument owe their present-day good fortune to the digestive tracts of the abundant seabirds that inhabited them a century and a half ago.

White Gold

Guano was fertilizer as good as it got at the time for fertilizing farmer's fields to feed a growing world population, before the development of synthetic ammonia fertilizers in the early part of the 20th century.

"American farmers first learned of the powerful fertilizing properties of guano in the mid-1840's," wrote legal historian Christina Duffy Posna of Columbia University Law School in New York in a 2005 essay on the American "guano islands."

Peruvians had known about it for centuries and enjoyed a monopoly over the Chincha Islands, where birds had deposited tons of what came to be known as "white gold." Hundreds of thousands of seabirds can nest on a single island, and migrating birds overwinter on them as well. The tightly packed birds cover the small islands, which receive little rain and intense sunlight, perfect conditions for drying out guano deposits.

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Bird Droppings Led to U.S. Possession of Newly Protected Pacific Islands