In reply to Jed Rothwell's message of Mon, 26 Nov 2007 18:33:46 -0500: Hi, [snip] >Rick Monteverde wrote: > >>Natural gold "reefs" (prospectors dream of them in vivid living color) are >>generally thought to occur as a result of bacteria colonies that at the very >>least concentrated the element from solution in flowing water. Maybe they >>mutated the Au out of other elements, who knows. > >That is the first thing that occurred to me when Joe called! I >mentioned to him that many coral species and others can extract >minute amounts of some elements from seawater, such as iodine. > >Arthur Clarke wrote about an imaginary species of coral bioengineered >to extract gold from seawater, in "Imperial Earth."
No need to bioengineer anything. There is already a species of seeweed that does this. Regards, Robin van Spaandonk The shrub is a plant.
