Scientists Discover Nickel-Eating Plant Species

An anonymous reader writes "A new species of metal-eating plant has been discovered in the Philippines, and the plant loves to eat nickel. From the article: 'Scientists from the University of the Philippines, Los Baños have discovered Rinorea niccolifera, a plant species that accumulates up to 18,000 ppm of the metal in its leaves without poisoning itself, according to Edwino Fernando, lead author of the report and professor, said in a statement. Fernando and his team say that the hyper-accumulation of nickel is a very rare phenomenon, with only about 0.5 percent to 1 percent of plant species native to environments with nickel-rich soil.'"

Comments

Marijuana has been eating my nickels

[retroworks]

And my 50 dollar bills.

Re:Marijuana has been eating my nickels

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, but you get them back later as "dime bags".

Sounds like a defense mechanism.

[mmell]

I am assuming that the concentration of nickel in the plant is high enough to make it unpleasant to herbivores, possibly even toxic. Of course, it could merely be an adaptation to take advantage of environments which other plants have difficulty with.

In either event, I wonder if the concentration of nickel in these plants is sufficiently high to make farming them a productive mining activity?

Re:Sounds like a defense mechanism.

[DigiShaman]

It's called phytomining. Primary used in the extraction of gold when available.

Re:Sounds like a defense mechanism.

[ColdWetDog]

According to Wikipedia most current nickel deposits run around 1% ore purity. The plant comes out to about 1.8% nickel which is high enough grade but - you need thousand of tons of ore to make it commercially feasible. Thousands of tons of plant matter is one hell of a lot of bushes.

Re:Sounds like a defense mechanism.

[Intrepid imaginaut]

I'd imagine you'd probably only get a couple of harvests before the soil loses all of its ore too. Genetically engineered seaweed to extract metals from seawater, now that might be a longer term prospect.

Re:Sounds like a defense mechanism.

[bluegutang]

Of course, processing the plant should be easier. You just burn it.

Re:Sounds like a defense mechanism.

[cusco]

Problem with seaweeds is that a lot of them are actually cooperative algae (like kelp). A heavy rain causes a pond to overflow or a seagull leave a pond with some stuck to its feathers and now it's in the wild. I hope that the petroleum-excreting algae continue to be utter failures for that reason.

Re:Sounds like a defense mechanism.

[Neil Boekend]

It is an advantage that the soil loses it's nickel. For most life that stuff is toxic.
Just deep plow the soil each couple of years after harvest to get the top 1m about equally. After a couple of decades the nickel will have left the upper 1m of soil. Remove 80 cm of it and continue. After 3 cycles you can return the upper layers so you can let forests grow there. No deep rooted trees, because those go deeper than 2.4m, but some species should fare quite well.

A university in the bathroom?

[Nutria]

I know the Philippines are poor, but this is ridiculous!

Re:A university in the bathroom?

[Trepidity]

Yeah that sounds pretty low-class. In rich countries we put our universities in sensible places, like the spa.

A new way to mine nickel?

[mark_reh]

Hmmmm.

Re:A new way to mine nickel?

[Immerman]

18,000ppm=1.8%, versus 1-2% for common nickel ores. Not too bad.

And that is presumably before you dry the leaves, which since most plants are ~75% water would quadruple the concentration to 7.2% nickel.

Re:A new way to mine nickel?

[Anonymous Coward]

Elemental analysis is usually done against dry weight.

Lead author?

[Anonymous Coward]

Weren't we talking about nickel? I'm confused...

Re:Interesting Discovery

[Ken McE]

Now if we could only find plants to leech radioactive particles for both Japan and Ukraine

two problems: 1.) As the plant accumulates isotopes it will tend to irradiate itself. The better it works, the worse the problem.

2.) I'm not familiar with any biological processes that distinguish between isotopes. You'd need a suite of plants, each one a specialist at one or more elements, and you would bring in the appropriate plants for whatever you wanted to collect at a particular site. In fact you'd need multiple plants for each element, a wetland plant, a dryland plant, a warm weather plant, etc. You'd match them up with the geography of your various sites.

Re:Interesting Discovery

[Immerman]

1) Then the question becomes, can the plant concentrate a useful amount of material before it dies? A lawn that needs to be mowed whenever it starts to wilt could be a wonderful way to remeditate an area. Or can it concentrate it in particular parts - for example a tree that concentrates radioactive isotopes in inedible fruit could be effective for cleaning deep-soil contamination.

2) Nor am I - yet there are nonetheless a few plants which appear to somehow manage to do so, I wish could remember more details beyond them existing and presenting a biological mystery.

Re:Is it "eating," or "absorbing?"

[sillybilly]

For whatever reason the plant seems to accumulate it. However I always maintain some skepticism, I don't just believe everything I read on the first read without duplicated literature backing it up. Even then it may be under special circumstances that it accumulates that much. Like I can dunk some dry hay into nickel sulfate, and do an analysis on it, and show that look, there is lots of nickel absorbed by the plant. Or even into a piece of paper towel. There are may ways to make mistakes and come up with hype like this.

Re:Interesting Discovery

[the biologist]

It is called tobacco.

http://www.ukcia.org/research/cancer2.php

Re:About the author

[joelleo]

Jeebus he must weigh a LOT!!

First-glance misread

[wonkey_monkey]

"Scientists Discover Nickel-Eating Planet-Spiders"

Mushrooms

[dutchwhizzman]

Mushrooms are actually quite good at that and once those decay, they leave almost nothing in "dry material".

Patent nonsense

[Martin S.]

There are hundred of natural [a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperaccumulator"]Hyper-Accumulators[/a]

However active use of these is blocked by patent e.g. http://www.google.co.uk/patent...

What does this have to do with the thread?

[mmell]

I'm guessing that when Mommy rescued you from the schoolyard bullies she told you to "just keep repeating 'it's okay'". That's why you keep repeating yourself here. It's the only kind of emotional reassurance you can get nowadays, isn't it?

Incidentally, your software may or may not be okay - but only a madman would trust anything you wrote to run in ring 0 (kernelspace).

What does that have to do with this thread?

[mmell]

Unlike you, I don't post A/C.

I'm sure you believe otherwise; but that's because you can only post A/C. Been banned here at /. like over at Wikipedia? I'm sure your delusional pattern is the result of long-term abuse by one or both of your parents, combined with schoolyard bullying. In fact, your behavior here is proof of this. You've discovered an arena where you can be the bully - only none of us are running home crying.

Must be scary - having someone you've never met personally so accurately describe your life? You're still a poor child, helpless to defend himself. You're A/C, and the only posts I've ever seen supporting you have come from yourself, the A/C. It's not fair, is it? Even here, you are the bullied, not the bully - isn't that right?