Mukojima Islands was added to Your Favorites!
Ogasawara NP, Tokyo
Claim this place to tell your story your way.
In January 2022, a short-tailed albatross chick hatched on Mukojima to a father born there in 2016—the first breeding by an Ogasawara-born bird. His own father had been brought from Torishima, so the chick marked a new generation in the restoration effort.
A photo of a plant on Nakōdojima’s cliffs, posted by Tokyo in 2016, caught a researcher’s eye in 2018. It proved to be a new species, Mukojima Sedum—the first endemic plant reported from the island group. Its cliff home likely protected it from goats.
The Japanese names read like a tiny wedding party: 聟島 (Mukojima) means “groom island,” 嫁島 (Yomejima) “bride island,” and 媒島 (Nakōdojima) “matchmaker island.” The real islands are neighbors in this northern Ogasawara chain.
Fishers voluntarily closed the waters within 2 km of Yomejima to fishing in 1998 to protect stocks. After 3 years, surveys found red-spotted groupers were larger and caught more readily there than at a comparison site, suggesting the pause was helping.
Feral goats turned Nakōdojima’s hillsides into a reef problem: grazing and trampling stripped vegetation, and loose soil washed into the sea, damaging coral ecosystems. Tokyo removed 417 goats from Nakōdojima between 1997 and 1999.
From 2008 to 2012, conservationists flew 70 short-tailed albatross chicks from Torishima to Mukojima by helicopter and raised them there. 69 fledged, and returning birds were recorded from 2011—an unusual journey from temporary nursery to future breeding ground.
Nearby Kita-no-jima (North Island), not the main island Mukojima, was once a major short-tailed albatross breeding ground. Ogasawara’s management plan records it as such before 1930; overexploitation in the 1930s erased the group’s historic breeding sites.
In a study of flower visitors, small native bees and hoverflies were the most frequent visitors on Mukojima. On Chichijima and Anijima, introduced honeybees were the most frequent—a striking difference in who does the pollinating from island to island.
