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.

[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.

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.