A new plant species called Rinorea niccolifera has a unique lifestyle. It eats nickel for a living.
This species can accumulate up to 18,000 ppm of the metal in its leaves without itself being poisoned, said scientists from University of the Philippines, Los Banos.
Such an amount is a hundred to a thousand times higher than in most other plants.
The new species was discovered on the western part of Luzon Island in the Philippines, an area known for soils rich in heavy metals.
The study was published in the open access journal PhytoKeys.
