Plant researcher Dr Antony van der Ent has ventured deep into the rainforest on the island of New Caledonia. He is looking for a unusual type of rainforest shrub, Pycnandra acuminiata, which exists nowhere else in the world. The plant is remarkable in being able to accumulate metals at a level that would cause any other living organism to get sick and die.
Dr Van der Ent is lucky today. He finds a specimen of the shrub, brings out his knife, and cuts into a stem. Today, eight years later, he can still remember what it felt like to watch the sap leak from the open wound.
“It was spectacular, being in the New Caledonian rainforest watching with my own eyes the blue-green latex – some 25% nickel – seeping out of the stem for the first time,” he tells Science Illustrated.
The plant on this Pacific island is an example of a particular type of biological rarity:
