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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