We’re not saying this eucalyptus tree in Australia is a gold digger, but, uh, it has literally been drawing up gold from the ground and accumulating the metal in its leaves. PopSci writes:
Researchers recently discovered relatively high levels of gold in the leaves of a eucalyptus tree in Western Australia, before uncovering a deposit of the metal more than 100 feet beneath it.
“Finding such high concentrations of gold in the foliage of this tree growing over a gold deposit buried beneath 35 meters of weathered rock was a complete surprise,” Melvyn Lintern, a geochemist at Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), told The Scientist.
Lazy, greedy humans are now thinking of piggybacking on this tree’s hard work (you think it’s easy absorbing gold out of the ground?) to figure out where precious metal is hiding without digging random holes. The idea is, they’ll only dig for gold where they find trees like this one. What can we say — this gold digger shouldn’t have been messing with no broke [geochemists].
