Hi, this is Julián from MinuteEarth.
This shrub is super metal.
No, literally...it’s a rare, metal-hoarding plant whose bluish-green sap, when dried out,
is 25% nickel – that’s ten times more nickel than the typical nickel-containing
ore found in nickel mines!
In fact, these plants are actually planted in abandoned nickel mines to take the leftover
nickel out of the soil, which keeps the toxic metals from leaching into waterways and makes
the land viable for other uses like farming.
And these metal-hoarding plants are even planted in particularly nickel-rich land, then harvested
and processed to extract enough metal to return a profit!
ALL plants are able to take some metals up from the soil, after all, they're used in
crucial tasks – nickel, for instance, is a critical part of plants’ nitrogen cycle.
But, most plants contain less than 0.0005% nickel and similar levels of other metals
– any more than that is usually toxic.
Surplus nickel inhibits cell division and harms the chlorophyll needed for photosynthesis
in leaves – all leading to very dead plants.
So how do metal-hoarders survive with 50,000 times the normal amount - and what do they
do with it?
This isn't just a matter of the plants passively absorbing more metal from nutrient-packed
soil.
Metal-hoarding plants actively suck in way more metal than normal, and they do so by
making a lot more of the special proteins that plants use to take in specific nutrients
from the soil.
Similar proteins transport the metal up into the leaves and trap it in cordoned off pockets
within leaf cells, helping the plant wondrously evade death.
Ok, but why the heck do they slurp up so much nickel if they’re just going to pack it
away?
Maybe other hoarders can give us a clue, like the salt-loving plants that use this same
mechanism to hoard salt, another nutrient that generally kills plants at high concentrations.
As it turns out, all that hoarded salt attracts more water from the soil, so salt-hoarding
is a great adaptation for plants living in drought-prone areas.
Meanwhile metal-hoarders use precious plant energy to collect a bunch of metal that seems
to just sit there doing nothing...or is it?
Scientists believe these super metal plants are (perhaps unsurprisingly) super toxic to
some herbivores, which learn to avoid eating them.
So plants that can take up toxic metals - and survive - become toxic themselves, without
having to expend energy to concoct their own defensive toxins.
If you want to be left alone...just turn up the metal.
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