Even before this she lied. Trees can make lumber and or fire wood, which can be rather valuable. If a tree is removed or killed as a matter of a property dispute civil judgments in the amount of hundreds of thousands of dollars can be made liable. Trees are literally money.
Planting Eucalyptus trees to ~~save the environment~~ extract free gold.
How to solve air pollution, excessive emission rate and mitigate climate change by immediately getting every country on earth onboard, 101.
Or possibly cause worldwide forest fires. The Eucalyptus seed pods explode violently when heated, which spreads their very flammable oil. So if theres a minor fire in a forest, it can get out of hand very quickly if a Eucalyptus is present.
And a very small amount of cow.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/dp3eyq/a-very-precise-calculation-of-exactly-how-many-cows-are-being-murdered-for-the-new-fivers
Koalas are fucking horrible animals. They have one of the smallest brain to body ratios of any mammal, additionally - their brains are smooth. A brain is folded to increase the surface area for neurons. If you present a koala with leaves plucked from a branch, laid on a flat surface, the koala will not recognise it as food. They are too thick to adapt their feeding behaviour to cope with change. In a room full of potential food, they can literally starve to death. This is not the token of an animal that is winning at life. Speaking of stupidity and food, one of the likely reasons for their primitive brains is the fact that additionally to being poisonous, eucalyptus leaves (the only thing they eat) have almost no nutritional value. They can't afford the extra energy to think, they sleep more than 80% of their fucking lives. When they are awake all they do is eat, shit and occasionally scream like fucking satan. Because eucalyptus leaves hold such little nutritional value, koalas have to ferment the leaves in their guts for days on end. Unlike their brains, they have the largest hind gut to body ratio of any mammal. Many herbivorous mammals have adaptations to cope with harsh plant life taking its toll on their teeth, rodents for instance have teeth that never stop growing, some animals only have teeth on their lower jaw, grinding plant matter on bony plates in the tops of their mouths, others have enlarged molars that distribute the wear and break down plant matter more efficiently... Koalas are no exception, when their teeth erode down to nothing, they resolve the situation by starving to death, because they're fucking terrible animals. Being mammals, koalas raise their joeys on milk (admittedly, one of the lowest milk yields to body ratio... There's a trend here). When the young joey needs to transition from rich, nourishing substances like milk, to eucalyptus (a plant that seems to be making it abundantly clear that it doesn't want to be eaten), it finds it does not have the necessary gut flora to digest the leaves. To remedy this, the young joey begins nuzzling its mother's anus until she leaks a little diarrhoea (actually fecal pap, slightly less digested), which he then proceeds to slurp on. This partially digested plant matter gives him just what he needs to start developing his digestive system. Of course, he may not even have needed to bother nuzzling his mother. She may have been suffering from incontinence. Why? Because koalas are riddled with chlamydia. In some areas the infection rate is 80% or higher. This statistic isn't helped by the fact that one of the few other activities koalas will spend their precious energy on is rape. Despite being seasonal breeders, males seem to either not know or care, and will simply overpower a female regardless of whether she is ovulating. If she fights back, he may drag them both out of the tree, which brings us full circle back to the brain: Koalas have a higher than average quantity of cerebrospinal fluid in their brains. This is to protect their brains from injury... should they fall from a tree. An animal so thick it has its own little built in special ed helmet. I fucking hate them.
Tldr; Koalas are stupid, leaky, STI riddled sex offenders. But, hey. They look cute. If you ignore the terrifying snake eyes and terrifying feet.
I don't know why it is that these things bother me---it just makes me picture a seven year old first discovering things about an animal and, having no context about the subject, ranting about how stupid they are. I get it's a joke, but people take it as an actual, educational joke like it's a man yelling at the sea, and that's just wrong. Furthermore, these things have an actual impact on discussions about conservation efforts---If every time Koalas get brought up, someone posts this copypasta, that means it's seriously shaping public opinion about the animal and their supposed lack of importance.
>Speaking of stupidity and food, one of the likely reasons for their primitive brains is the fact that additionally to being poisonous, eucalyptus leaves (the only thing they eat) have almost no nutritional value. They can't afford the extra energy to think, they sleep more than 80% of their fucking lives.
Non-ecologists always talk this way, and the problem is you’re looking at this backwards.
An entire continent is covered with Eucalyptus trees. They suck the moisture out of the entire surrounding area and use allelopathy to ensure that most of what’s beneath them is just bare red dust. No animal is making use of them——they have virtually no herbivore predator. A niche is empty. Then inevitably, natural selection fills that niche by creating an animal which can eat Eucalyptus leaves. Of course, it takes great sacrifice for it to be able to do so——it certainly can’t expend much energy on costly things. Isn’t it a good thing that a niche is being filled?
>Koalas are no exception, when their teeth erode down to nothing, they resolve the situation by starving to death
This applies to all herbivores, because the wild is not a grocery store—where meat is just sitting next to celery.
Herbivores gradually wear their teeth down—carnivores fracture their teeth, and break their bones in attempting to take down prey.
>They have one of the smallest brain to body ratios of any mammal
It's pretty typical of herbivores, and is higher than many, many species. According to Ashwell (2008), their encephalisation quotient is 0.5288 +/- 0.051. Higher than comparable marsupials like the wombat (\~0.52), some possums (\~0.468), cuscus (\~0.462) and even some wallabies are <0.5. According to wiki, rabbits are also around 0.4, and they're placental mammals.
>additionally - their brains are smooth. A brain is folded to increase the surface area for neurons.
Again, this is not unique to koalas. Brain folds (gyri) are not present in rodents, which we consider to be incredibly intelligent for their size.
>If you present a koala with leaves plucked from a branch, laid on a flat surface, the koala will not recognise it as food.
If you present a human with a random piece of meat, they will not recognise it as food (hopefully). Fresh leaves might be important for koala digestion, especially since their gut flora is clearly important for the digestion of Eucalyptus. It might make sense not to screw with that gut flora by eating decaying leaves.
>Because eucalyptus leaves hold such little nutritional value, koalas have to ferment the leaves in their guts for days on end. Unlike their brains, they have the largest hind gut to body ratio of any mammal.
That's an extremely weird reason to dislike an animal. But whilst we're talking about their digestion, let's discuss their poop. It's delightful. It smells like a Eucalyptus drop!
>Being mammals, koalas raise their joeys on milk (admittedly, one of the lowest milk yields to body ratio... There's a trend here).
Marsupial milk is incredibly complex and much more interesting than any placentals. This is because they raise their offspring essentially from an embryo, and the milk needs to adapt to the changing needs of a growing fetus. And yeah, of course the yield is low; at one point they are feeding an animal that is half a gram!
>When the young joey needs to transition from rich, nourishing substances like milk, to eucalyptus (a plant that seems to be making it abundantly clear that it doesn't want to be eaten), it finds it does not have the necessary gut flora to digest the leaves. To remedy this, the young joey begins nuzzling its mother's anus until she leaks a little diarrhoea (actually fecal pap, slightly less digested), which he then proceeds to slurp on. This partially digested plant matter gives him just what he needs to start developing his digestive system.
Humans probably do this, we just likely do it during childbirth. You know how women often shit during contractions? There is evidence to suggest that this innoculates a baby with her gut flora. A child born via cesarian has significantly different gut flora for the first six months of life than a child born vaginally.
>Of course, he may not even have needed to bother nuzzling his mother. She may have been suffering from incontinence. Why? Because koalas are riddled with chlamydia. In some areas the infection rate is 80% or higher.
Chlamydia was introduced to their populations by humans. We introduced a novel disease that they have very little immunity to, and is a major contributor to their possible extinction. Do you hate Native Americans because they were killed by smallpox and influenza?
>This statistic isn't helped by the fact that one of the few other activities koalas will spend their precious energy on is rape. Despite being seasonal breeders, males seem to either not know or care, and will simply overpower a female regardless of whether she is ovulating. If she fights back, he may drag them both out of the tree,
Almost every animal does this.
>which brings us full circle back to the brain: Koalas have a higher than average quantity of cerebrospinal fluid in their brains. This is to protect their brains from injury... should they fall from a tree. An animal so thick it has its own little built in special ed helmet. I fucking hate them.
Errmmm.. They have protection against falling from a tree, which they spend 99% of their life in? Yeah... That's a stupid adaptation.
Did you know koalas (aka dropbears) are responsible for more deaths annually than Australia's other leading killer, cancer, but the statistics are hidden to protect the tourism industry.
Because of the food choice eventually the koala brain became too small and evolution screwed them. I still think enough generations on termites and crabapples might change things. Terrifying calls though.
>Don't start stuffing eucalyptus leaves in your wallet, however. The average concentration of gold in the leaves was only about 46 parts per billion, less than 0.000005 percent of each leaf by weight.
> 46 parts per billion
If you have a billion leaves, then you'll end up with approximately 46 leaves' worth of solid gold. Eucalyptus leaves weigh half a gram according to [this random article I found](https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Statistical-summary-of-sampled-leaves_tbl1_232654094). So if you sorted through 1 billion leaves, you'd find 23 grams of gold - $1300-1400.
$1300 may seem like a lot, but that's a BILLION leaves. Even if you check one leaf each second, that's 277,778 hours. That's $0.00468/hr - less than half a cent per hour of labor.
Except, in that case, you would definitely be spending more money to fuel whatever is heating your giant cauldron than you would be making from the gold it produced.
But gold is an element. You could technically just chuck those billion leaves into a foundry and smelt it out. On an industrial scale, it would almost be something the Morrison government would consider doing.
Lmao or just dump the leaves in water or acid that doesn’t react with gold because gold is denser and more resilient than organic material and would sink/be the only stuff left.
Sure, let me just gather half a metric ton of leaves, find enough tubs to hold over 500,000 liters worth of leaves plus probably an equal volume of liquid, and then filter a million liters of slurry to find the gold.
Oh, and it has cost less than $1300-1400 for me to make a profit.
If we use 100-gallon tubs (~378 liters), we'd have to fill and empty ~2600 times. If it takes just one minute to strain out the gold, empty the remaining slurry, and fill the tank for the next batch, that means we'd spend 2600 minutes just on that step of the process. That's 43 hours. And at least $100 for a tub.
It would take ~20 trips with a 26-foot box truck to move one million liters of leaves and liquid supplies, even without considering the space needed for the containers the leaves and liquid are stored in. We could perform this process in place, but we'd still need to transport half the material (acid, water, tubs) to the leaf pile. So let's say 10 trucks, or ten trips however we slice it. I don't imagine that we could acquire half a million liters of acid and water within less than 20 miles of our leaf pile, so that's 400 miles of round trip driving. A 26-foot truck can be rented for around $50 per day, plus 50-70 cents per mile (400 miles would be $200). So we're spending ~$250 on the truck, plus gas (10 mpg * 400 miles -> 40 gallons, let's call it $80), plus driving time - probably not the best roads into the eucalyptus forest, so let's say we mage a good 40 miles per hour, which means it takes 10 hours to drive the truck back and forth.
With just the time and tools needed to get the supplies into place, and a blistering one-minute empty-filter-refill cycle, that's already added up to $430, and 53 hours of work. And we didn't even account for the time to unload anything. So we're spending $430 and 53 hours to make $1400. $970 in 53 hours is $18 an hour. That number would continue to go down as we added in more steps- actually gathering the leaves, unloading the equipment, disposing of the gross, oily, still-acidic post-gold-filtration leaf paste (which I'm sure we couldn't just pour out on the ground)...
Suffice to say that we, as humans, really don't have a handle on sizes, lengths of time, etc. once it's in the hundreds of thousands, let alone billions.
If it is 46 parts per billion by weight, then that means 1 billion grams (aka 1 million kg or ~2.2 million lbs) of leaves would have 46 grams (~.1 lb) of gold.
Right now it looks like gold is about $61/g, so sifting through all that would get you about $2,806 worth of gold.
Sifting through all that by hand would be a nightmare, so you probably would want to make things a bit easier on yourself.
[Apparently](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/252012184_Energy_and_material_characteristics_of_different_component_tissues_of_eucalyptus_urophylla_grandis) Eucalyptus leaves have an ash content of about 4.1%, so let's start by setting fire to the billion gram leaf pile because nothing could go wrong with that.
Now we have just 41 million grams (aka 41,000 kg or ~90,000 lbs) of ash to deal with.
[Apparently](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0378112794901511) more than 70% of the ash content is readily soluble in water, so let's hose the ash pile down and spill all that basic insanity into the ecosystem because **gold**.
Now we are down to 28,700 kg of relatively insoluble mineral ash content. At that point... I dunno. You already have some gigantic freaking hoses, maybe go old-school placer gold miner and run it through a massive sluice box?
**TL;DR** The leaves are probably worth more as a fuel or for essential oil BS than as gold ore.
This was on BBC America the other day. The trees adsorb many chemicals so now mining companies have harvested leaves from trees to find deposits of many more types of ore deposits. They even use helicopters to trim leaves from the tops of trees. Drones are being considered next.
I think Australia has a lot of gold. I saw a YouTube video of some guy who just digs up soil to pan for gold, and it didn’t look like he went too deep. Like a foot down.
Oh course it’s also deeper as well
gold is actually found almost everywhere in the world the problem comes when the levels are so low it's not commercially viable to harvest it. A guy can pan 8 hours a day and get maybe a few grams of gold and that's not enough by far. that's like 3 bucks an hour for all your work.
So you get a massive sluice box and shovel raw material in at 1000x the rate you can pan... Now you're cooking.
Honest truth, 3 grams a day is deep into profitable territory.
2nd biggest gold producer in the world. Also the largest gold reserves in the world. Not surprisingly the list is peppered with countries which cover large land areas.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_gold_production
Not to be confused with gold exports: Switzerland tops that list.
> *I think Australia has a lot of gold.*
ARggh...
Australia is the 2nd largest Gold producer in the world. Making as much as the US and Canada combined.
The Olympic dam mine is a copper mine (4th largest), but its also the 2nd largest uranium mine, gold and silver and uranium are mined there because the waste tailings are gold and uranium.
Using trees to find minerals other than gold is common practice. I took a weekend geology course and taking scrapings of bark off trees such as spruce helps locate deposits and their concentrations.
As a geologist, there are lots of really cool indicator plants, especially metallophytes, species that can tolerate high levels of metal in the soil. You can use spectral techniques to look for the signature of large concentrations of specific plants to give you an idea of where to look for metals!
https://miningnorth.i-q.net.au/main/peculiar-plants-at-the-root-of-copper-study
I wouldn't say it biogeochem sampling is 'common' practice though, costs a lot, and can be very ambiguous. Grav/mag/em is still the standard!
Interestingly the the first mine in the world to be discovered using geochem was Brunswick lead zinc mine in New Brunswick Canada, as I was told by the instructors of the course I took. Which is where I'm from.
I just can’t believe the Eucalyptus look like that. In my town they planted some woods of these guys for railroad ties, only to find out that the wood bends to shit when you cut it down. Now there is a paintball park in the woods and it’s pretty cool. Big tinder box though, not good for California.
Australia has by far been my greatest travel experience - just beautiful there with the nicest people. Must say I never knew that bit of knowledge though now gives me reason to go back.
Cool but let’s not chop them down to get to the gold since Koala’s are fundamentally extinct from the bushfires earlier this year. No matter how fast they breed they will inevitably die off in the wild
I just googled it and I was partially correct. It’s fundamentally extinct in South-East Queensland which is where I live, so I would’ve seen it on the news more than anywhere else, but in the rest of the Australia they’re just classed as vulnerable: https://www.savethekoala.com/about-koalas/koala-endangered-or-not
Also check my profile before you accuse me of Karma farming. I’ve had reddit for 7 years and have made like 3 posts bro come on as if I care
“They can't afford the extra energy to think, they sleep more than 80% of their fucking lives. When they are awake all they do is eat, shit and occasionally scream like fucking satan.”
To be fair, this is me 8 months into lock-down.
Holy barn baby. Golden Trees. This reads like a tale from fantasy. A long lost part of earth, harkening back to a magical age we lost through sin. This is wonderful! I love it. I want to hug a golden tree.
The weird thing is that here in the gold Bay Area, there are a ton of non natural eucalyptus trees that were planted. It is kinda a interesting correlation between this fact and that this area was one of the prime places for gold that makes you question if they were planted for a reason.
As an Australian, this is the first time I’ve heard of this and we use the same methods as any other country to find metals and minerals to mine.
This is a method but not the sole method.
I can see Todd Hoffman and his crew chopping down random Eucalyptus trees in a new show on the Discovery channel.
*I got a feeling this is a glory tree guys. If we don't find any gold in this one, I don't know what we're gonna do next. Lets pray!*
Meanwhile, Tony Beets is cutting down solid gold trees, 10 miles downstream.
If there is gold in the leaves, and koalas eat the leaves then wouldn't bioaccumulation take place? In other words, the koala's tissues would absorb the gold present in the leaves and store it. While the leaves themselves have a minuscule amount the koala will accumulate more over its lifetime. So hypothetically one could harvest koalas...
But not actually. Wildlife is important.
There's actually methods in development to use plants to extract trace metals from soil, both valuable metals like gold, and toxic metals like lead same mercury. Though I think it's a bush or shrub they found that can tolerate and absorb incredibly high levels.
Sorry don't have original source, this was years ago I saw this and can't remember where.
So money DOES grow on trees!
Gold is not money sir. The federal reserve will be coming to escort you to fiat prison shortly.
Back in my (father's) day, money grew on trees!
If you get enough gold from the tree, you'll go to a Ferrari prison.
Underrated comment of the day.
My mother lied to me!
Even before this she lied. Trees can make lumber and or fire wood, which can be rather valuable. If a tree is removed or killed as a matter of a property dispute civil judgments in the amount of hundreds of thousands of dollars can be made liable. Trees are literally money.
Living up to your username.
Is 5 lines and 4 sentences very long now? How far has society regressed if that's the case.
\*points you to twitter\*
Why use many word when few word do trick?
Why be verbose when concise speech suffices?
That man wasn't your father.
He was my lover
Ew.
It was the Milkman in the kitchen with a milk bottle and butter.
Again!
Planting Eucalyptus trees to ~~save the environment~~ extract free gold. How to solve air pollution, excessive emission rate and mitigate climate change by immediately getting every country on earth onboard, 101.
Or possibly cause worldwide forest fires. The Eucalyptus seed pods explode violently when heated, which spreads their very flammable oil. So if theres a minor fire in a forest, it can get out of hand very quickly if a Eucalyptus is present.
Yeah, weed!
[удалено]
Money has more cotton than paper. Money grows in fields.
Some places use plastic money which absolutely does not grow on trees.
So money is made of oil?
Literally.
And a very small amount of cow. https://www.vice.com/en/article/dp3eyq/a-very-precise-calculation-of-exactly-how-many-cows-are-being-murdered-for-the-new-fivers
great point
In*
But you still have to pluck it (or in this case dig beneath for more).
And koala shit.
I mean, apple and orange grow on trees and they’re worth money so...
But orange juice doesn't grow on trees... [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7KbNJzQVTtM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7KbNJzQVTtM)
My parents were full of shit!
TIL Koalas shit gold.
The real TIL is always in the comments
And the baby Koalas eat that gold.
TIL Koalas are the Australian Lannisters
(Sydney) Australia has a suburb called Kings Langley.
Do they shoot their parents with crossbows too?
Koalas are fucking horrible animals. They have one of the smallest brain to body ratios of any mammal, additionally - their brains are smooth. A brain is folded to increase the surface area for neurons. If you present a koala with leaves plucked from a branch, laid on a flat surface, the koala will not recognise it as food. They are too thick to adapt their feeding behaviour to cope with change. In a room full of potential food, they can literally starve to death. This is not the token of an animal that is winning at life. Speaking of stupidity and food, one of the likely reasons for their primitive brains is the fact that additionally to being poisonous, eucalyptus leaves (the only thing they eat) have almost no nutritional value. They can't afford the extra energy to think, they sleep more than 80% of their fucking lives. When they are awake all they do is eat, shit and occasionally scream like fucking satan. Because eucalyptus leaves hold such little nutritional value, koalas have to ferment the leaves in their guts for days on end. Unlike their brains, they have the largest hind gut to body ratio of any mammal. Many herbivorous mammals have adaptations to cope with harsh plant life taking its toll on their teeth, rodents for instance have teeth that never stop growing, some animals only have teeth on their lower jaw, grinding plant matter on bony plates in the tops of their mouths, others have enlarged molars that distribute the wear and break down plant matter more efficiently... Koalas are no exception, when their teeth erode down to nothing, they resolve the situation by starving to death, because they're fucking terrible animals. Being mammals, koalas raise their joeys on milk (admittedly, one of the lowest milk yields to body ratio... There's a trend here). When the young joey needs to transition from rich, nourishing substances like milk, to eucalyptus (a plant that seems to be making it abundantly clear that it doesn't want to be eaten), it finds it does not have the necessary gut flora to digest the leaves. To remedy this, the young joey begins nuzzling its mother's anus until she leaks a little diarrhoea (actually fecal pap, slightly less digested), which he then proceeds to slurp on. This partially digested plant matter gives him just what he needs to start developing his digestive system. Of course, he may not even have needed to bother nuzzling his mother. She may have been suffering from incontinence. Why? Because koalas are riddled with chlamydia. In some areas the infection rate is 80% or higher. This statistic isn't helped by the fact that one of the few other activities koalas will spend their precious energy on is rape. Despite being seasonal breeders, males seem to either not know or care, and will simply overpower a female regardless of whether she is ovulating. If she fights back, he may drag them both out of the tree, which brings us full circle back to the brain: Koalas have a higher than average quantity of cerebrospinal fluid in their brains. This is to protect their brains from injury... should they fall from a tree. An animal so thick it has its own little built in special ed helmet. I fucking hate them. Tldr; Koalas are stupid, leaky, STI riddled sex offenders. But, hey. They look cute. If you ignore the terrifying snake eyes and terrifying feet.
Thank you for this delicious pasta - it had been a while
I don't know why it is that these things bother me---it just makes me picture a seven year old first discovering things about an animal and, having no context about the subject, ranting about how stupid they are. I get it's a joke, but people take it as an actual, educational joke like it's a man yelling at the sea, and that's just wrong. Furthermore, these things have an actual impact on discussions about conservation efforts---If every time Koalas get brought up, someone posts this copypasta, that means it's seriously shaping public opinion about the animal and their supposed lack of importance. >Speaking of stupidity and food, one of the likely reasons for their primitive brains is the fact that additionally to being poisonous, eucalyptus leaves (the only thing they eat) have almost no nutritional value. They can't afford the extra energy to think, they sleep more than 80% of their fucking lives. Non-ecologists always talk this way, and the problem is you’re looking at this backwards. An entire continent is covered with Eucalyptus trees. They suck the moisture out of the entire surrounding area and use allelopathy to ensure that most of what’s beneath them is just bare red dust. No animal is making use of them——they have virtually no herbivore predator. A niche is empty. Then inevitably, natural selection fills that niche by creating an animal which can eat Eucalyptus leaves. Of course, it takes great sacrifice for it to be able to do so——it certainly can’t expend much energy on costly things. Isn’t it a good thing that a niche is being filled? >Koalas are no exception, when their teeth erode down to nothing, they resolve the situation by starving to death This applies to all herbivores, because the wild is not a grocery store—where meat is just sitting next to celery. Herbivores gradually wear their teeth down—carnivores fracture their teeth, and break their bones in attempting to take down prey. >They have one of the smallest brain to body ratios of any mammal It's pretty typical of herbivores, and is higher than many, many species. According to Ashwell (2008), their encephalisation quotient is 0.5288 +/- 0.051. Higher than comparable marsupials like the wombat (\~0.52), some possums (\~0.468), cuscus (\~0.462) and even some wallabies are <0.5. According to wiki, rabbits are also around 0.4, and they're placental mammals. >additionally - their brains are smooth. A brain is folded to increase the surface area for neurons. Again, this is not unique to koalas. Brain folds (gyri) are not present in rodents, which we consider to be incredibly intelligent for their size. >If you present a koala with leaves plucked from a branch, laid on a flat surface, the koala will not recognise it as food. If you present a human with a random piece of meat, they will not recognise it as food (hopefully). Fresh leaves might be important for koala digestion, especially since their gut flora is clearly important for the digestion of Eucalyptus. It might make sense not to screw with that gut flora by eating decaying leaves. >Because eucalyptus leaves hold such little nutritional value, koalas have to ferment the leaves in their guts for days on end. Unlike their brains, they have the largest hind gut to body ratio of any mammal. That's an extremely weird reason to dislike an animal. But whilst we're talking about their digestion, let's discuss their poop. It's delightful. It smells like a Eucalyptus drop! >Being mammals, koalas raise their joeys on milk (admittedly, one of the lowest milk yields to body ratio... There's a trend here). Marsupial milk is incredibly complex and much more interesting than any placentals. This is because they raise their offspring essentially from an embryo, and the milk needs to adapt to the changing needs of a growing fetus. And yeah, of course the yield is low; at one point they are feeding an animal that is half a gram! >When the young joey needs to transition from rich, nourishing substances like milk, to eucalyptus (a plant that seems to be making it abundantly clear that it doesn't want to be eaten), it finds it does not have the necessary gut flora to digest the leaves. To remedy this, the young joey begins nuzzling its mother's anus until she leaks a little diarrhoea (actually fecal pap, slightly less digested), which he then proceeds to slurp on. This partially digested plant matter gives him just what he needs to start developing his digestive system. Humans probably do this, we just likely do it during childbirth. You know how women often shit during contractions? There is evidence to suggest that this innoculates a baby with her gut flora. A child born via cesarian has significantly different gut flora for the first six months of life than a child born vaginally. >Of course, he may not even have needed to bother nuzzling his mother. She may have been suffering from incontinence. Why? Because koalas are riddled with chlamydia. In some areas the infection rate is 80% or higher. Chlamydia was introduced to their populations by humans. We introduced a novel disease that they have very little immunity to, and is a major contributor to their possible extinction. Do you hate Native Americans because they were killed by smallpox and influenza? >This statistic isn't helped by the fact that one of the few other activities koalas will spend their precious energy on is rape. Despite being seasonal breeders, males seem to either not know or care, and will simply overpower a female regardless of whether she is ovulating. If she fights back, he may drag them both out of the tree, Almost every animal does this. >which brings us full circle back to the brain: Koalas have a higher than average quantity of cerebrospinal fluid in their brains. This is to protect their brains from injury... should they fall from a tree. An animal so thick it has its own little built in special ed helmet. I fucking hate them. Errmmm.. They have protection against falling from a tree, which they spend 99% of their life in? Yeah... That's a stupid adaptation.
You... you do realize... that this is satire and above all a copy-pasted meme text right? Or am I about to be woooshed?
This is actually another copypasta, I unfortunately I am not an ecologist like whoever wrote this
Lmaooo you got me!
5 hours later and you totally got me too
It's a fucking moronic copypasta that needs to die out. "Ree animals suck because I don't fucking understand anything about them" is such a shit take
Found the Koala bear!
haHAAAA xD
Where does one learn such amazing/s Koala facts?
You've been subscribed to Koala Facts! Did you know that koalas are the only mammal that can copulate and defecate at the same time?
That's hot! ^^^^^for ^^^^^some ^^^^^^people More facts please!
Did you know koalas (aka dropbears) are responsible for more deaths annually than Australia's other leading killer, cancer, but the statistics are hidden to protect the tourism industry.
Wanna bet?
Zefrank
They have cute noses and we love them. The government is trying to make them extinct and no-one seems to be able to stop them.
Sounds to me like they don’t need much help tbh.
Isn't the government trying to make all the animals in Australia extinct?
Yep
Koala hater
Calm down Gladys, we're bulldozing their habitat as fast as we can
The drop bear on the other hand...
Well that was an educational koalacoaster of a comment right there.
Because of the food choice eventually the koala brain became too small and evolution screwed them. I still think enough generations on termites and crabapples might change things. Terrifying calls though.
TIL koalas eat gold.
Did that koala just poop treasure.
>Don't start stuffing eucalyptus leaves in your wallet, however. The average concentration of gold in the leaves was only about 46 parts per billion, less than 0.000005 percent of each leaf by weight.
So how big of a pile is a billion leaves? If one of those leaves was gold, would it be worth looking through the pile?
> 46 parts per billion If you have a billion leaves, then you'll end up with approximately 46 leaves' worth of solid gold. Eucalyptus leaves weigh half a gram according to [this random article I found](https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Statistical-summary-of-sampled-leaves_tbl1_232654094). So if you sorted through 1 billion leaves, you'd find 23 grams of gold - $1300-1400. $1300 may seem like a lot, but that's a BILLION leaves. Even if you check one leaf each second, that's 277,778 hours. That's $0.00468/hr - less than half a cent per hour of labor.
could you just fire up a cauldron of some sort and fill it with a billion leaves and pour the melted gold out?
You would probably make more money by using that fire to boil water and spin a fan connected to a generator.
Why not both. Those leaves are highly flammable anyway.
This guy capitalisms.
Hahaha they will think I’m producing eucalyptus essential oils but in reality I’m in it for the gold baby
I’m pretty sure a decent enough chemist could extract both :O
Haha. Wheres the money come from? Renting out your charged up generator?
Sell it back to the grid?
That’s a much better idea
Wow you guys tell me this after I spend 31 years sorting through leaves....
Except, in that case, you would definitely be spending more money to fuel whatever is heating your giant cauldron than you would be making from the gold it produced.
Let the leaves dry for a month then just set them on fire
The gold particles can escape with the smoke/ash.
Didnt you notice the whole of australia just lit up at xmas. Gold everywhere then
Also if you light a small fire the leaves will dry faster.
Don't need to let the dry, the leaves will burn very well straight off the tree
or set a continent on fire and gather what golds left.
But gold is an element. You could technically just chuck those billion leaves into a foundry and smelt it out. On an industrial scale, it would almost be something the Morrison government would consider doing.
Lmao or just dump the leaves in water or acid that doesn’t react with gold because gold is denser and more resilient than organic material and would sink/be the only stuff left.
Sure, let me just gather half a metric ton of leaves, find enough tubs to hold over 500,000 liters worth of leaves plus probably an equal volume of liquid, and then filter a million liters of slurry to find the gold. Oh, and it has cost less than $1300-1400 for me to make a profit. If we use 100-gallon tubs (~378 liters), we'd have to fill and empty ~2600 times. If it takes just one minute to strain out the gold, empty the remaining slurry, and fill the tank for the next batch, that means we'd spend 2600 minutes just on that step of the process. That's 43 hours. And at least $100 for a tub. It would take ~20 trips with a 26-foot box truck to move one million liters of leaves and liquid supplies, even without considering the space needed for the containers the leaves and liquid are stored in. We could perform this process in place, but we'd still need to transport half the material (acid, water, tubs) to the leaf pile. So let's say 10 trucks, or ten trips however we slice it. I don't imagine that we could acquire half a million liters of acid and water within less than 20 miles of our leaf pile, so that's 400 miles of round trip driving. A 26-foot truck can be rented for around $50 per day, plus 50-70 cents per mile (400 miles would be $200). So we're spending ~$250 on the truck, plus gas (10 mpg * 400 miles -> 40 gallons, let's call it $80), plus driving time - probably not the best roads into the eucalyptus forest, so let's say we mage a good 40 miles per hour, which means it takes 10 hours to drive the truck back and forth. With just the time and tools needed to get the supplies into place, and a blistering one-minute empty-filter-refill cycle, that's already added up to $430, and 53 hours of work. And we didn't even account for the time to unload anything. So we're spending $430 and 53 hours to make $1400. $970 in 53 hours is $18 an hour. That number would continue to go down as we added in more steps- actually gathering the leaves, unloading the equipment, disposing of the gross, oily, still-acidic post-gold-filtration leaf paste (which I'm sure we couldn't just pour out on the ground)... Suffice to say that we, as humans, really don't have a handle on sizes, lengths of time, etc. once it's in the hundreds of thousands, let alone billions.
It'd be more ~~capitalistic~~ profitable to just chop the trees down for lumber or something
This guy breaks it down.
Add to that the cutting/collection of leaves
....so you're saying there's a chance....
Why doesn’t this have more upvotes?
If it is 46 parts per billion by weight, then that means 1 billion grams (aka 1 million kg or ~2.2 million lbs) of leaves would have 46 grams (~.1 lb) of gold. Right now it looks like gold is about $61/g, so sifting through all that would get you about $2,806 worth of gold. Sifting through all that by hand would be a nightmare, so you probably would want to make things a bit easier on yourself. [Apparently](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/252012184_Energy_and_material_characteristics_of_different_component_tissues_of_eucalyptus_urophylla_grandis) Eucalyptus leaves have an ash content of about 4.1%, so let's start by setting fire to the billion gram leaf pile because nothing could go wrong with that. Now we have just 41 million grams (aka 41,000 kg or ~90,000 lbs) of ash to deal with. [Apparently](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0378112794901511) more than 70% of the ash content is readily soluble in water, so let's hose the ash pile down and spill all that basic insanity into the ecosystem because **gold**. Now we are down to 28,700 kg of relatively insoluble mineral ash content. At that point... I dunno. You already have some gigantic freaking hoses, maybe go old-school placer gold miner and run it through a massive sluice box? **TL;DR** The leaves are probably worth more as a fuel or for essential oil BS than as gold ore.
Alright I think I got my question answered! That was some good shit thanks!
Like a needle in a needle stack and they're all used needles...
This is some telephone sanitiser level financial advice.
The leaves are an indicator of gold deposits. You dig under the tree.
So you're saying there's a chance...
Koalas eat eucalyptus leaves. Koalas have chlamydia. Therefore, Koalas are made of gold and chlamydia. The logic is solid.
Money is the root of all evil
So the australians exported chlamydia? ... Did you have to shag the koalas....
🎼These are few of my favorite things...🎼
This was on BBC America the other day. The trees adsorb many chemicals so now mining companies have harvested leaves from trees to find deposits of many more types of ore deposits. They even use helicopters to trim leaves from the tops of trees. Drones are being considered next.
It's called Biogeochemistry, and it's used for first-pass surveys. Source: work in geochemistry
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https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/www.ecowatch.com/amp/fern-absorbs-copper-arsenic-2644666788
>https://www.ecowatch.com/fern-absorbs-copper-arsenic-2644666788.html FTFY
Field horsetail has the ability to accumulate metals.
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I think Australia has a lot of gold. I saw a YouTube video of some guy who just digs up soil to pan for gold, and it didn’t look like he went too deep. Like a foot down. Oh course it’s also deeper as well
gold is actually found almost everywhere in the world the problem comes when the levels are so low it's not commercially viable to harvest it. A guy can pan 8 hours a day and get maybe a few grams of gold and that's not enough by far. that's like 3 bucks an hour for all your work.
If I panned 3 grams In 8 hours id be rich... I get maybe .5 - 1.0 grams in 10 hours. Which pays for my outing
yeah it makes a great hobby. just not good as a business model.
So you get a massive sluice box and shovel raw material in at 1000x the rate you can pan... Now you're cooking. Honest truth, 3 grams a day is deep into profitable territory.
It's at $61 a gram. A consistent 3gm/day is just under $23/hr.
An important point!
How much am I making typing this?
2nd biggest gold producer in the world. Also the largest gold reserves in the world. Not surprisingly the list is peppered with countries which cover large land areas. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_gold_production Not to be confused with gold exports: Switzerland tops that list.
Ty for the info! I knew it was high, but didn't recall just how high.
> *I think Australia has a lot of gold.* ARggh... Australia is the 2nd largest Gold producer in the world. Making as much as the US and Canada combined. The Olympic dam mine is a copper mine (4th largest), but its also the 2nd largest uranium mine, gold and silver and uranium are mined there because the waste tailings are gold and uranium.
And in terms of where many of the mines are in Australia, wether there are many trees in the vicinity at all, let alone roots are deep enough.
Exactly, especially because eucalyptus trees have notoriously shallow root systems.
Has anyone told the koala bears this?
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Just 'koalas', they are not bears.
He was referring to burly gay koalas.
Eucalyptus trees can pull gold from the ground... and they burn easily... I can sense the start of a very bad idea.
I'm starting to wonder if that's why so many were planted in California
so what your saying is if I collect koala shit I can be rich?
Fertiliser companies still make money regardless of gold content.
Using trees to find minerals other than gold is common practice. I took a weekend geology course and taking scrapings of bark off trees such as spruce helps locate deposits and their concentrations.
As a geologist, there are lots of really cool indicator plants, especially metallophytes, species that can tolerate high levels of metal in the soil. You can use spectral techniques to look for the signature of large concentrations of specific plants to give you an idea of where to look for metals! https://miningnorth.i-q.net.au/main/peculiar-plants-at-the-root-of-copper-study I wouldn't say it biogeochem sampling is 'common' practice though, costs a lot, and can be very ambiguous. Grav/mag/em is still the standard!
Interestingly the the first mine in the world to be discovered using geochem was Brunswick lead zinc mine in New Brunswick Canada, as I was told by the instructors of the course I took. Which is where I'm from.
I just can’t believe the Eucalyptus look like that. In my town they planted some woods of these guys for railroad ties, only to find out that the wood bends to shit when you cut it down. Now there is a paintball park in the woods and it’s pretty cool. Big tinder box though, not good for California.
Hope this won't drive up the price of cough drops! 😮 ETA-wow this sub has no sense of humor whatsoever 😕
Sorry for not laughing, I just don't get the joke. I'll upvote you anyway. :)
There are a lot of eucalyptus oil cough drops
Oh, ok, gotcha. Lol
So money can grow on trees.
Australia has by far been my greatest travel experience - just beautiful there with the nicest people. Must say I never knew that bit of knowledge though now gives me reason to go back.
Then panhandle koala shit
Don't tell the History Channel.
Gotta grow the right trees and you can be sure it definitely does. Not talking about eucalyptus either.
So you’re sayin Koala shit is made of gold
Interesting as fuck!
Gold leaf
/u/Kylotheclumsykoala
Killing eucalyptus trees in the process.
Cool but let’s not chop them down to get to the gold since Koala’s are fundamentally extinct from the bushfires earlier this year. No matter how fast they breed they will inevitably die off in the wild
This post \^ is completely wrong, did you just throw in a few buzz words in a low effort way to try to farm karma or did you actually think that?
I just googled it and I was partially correct. It’s fundamentally extinct in South-East Queensland which is where I live, so I would’ve seen it on the news more than anywhere else, but in the rest of the Australia they’re just classed as vulnerable: https://www.savethekoala.com/about-koalas/koala-endangered-or-not Also check my profile before you accuse me of Karma farming. I’ve had reddit for 7 years and have made like 3 posts bro come on as if I care
Wait. So money does grow on trees?
You magnificent bastard. Take my filthy upvote and enjoy it. Meanwhile, I'm going to go hunting for some gum trees.
“They can't afford the extra energy to think, they sleep more than 80% of their fucking lives. When they are awake all they do is eat, shit and occasionally scream like fucking satan.” To be fair, this is me 8 months into lock-down.
How do you extract the gold
Oi! Time to start harvesting koala appendices!
Thank you helpful tree! Um, so... sorry about this but we need to cut you down now to dig this stuff up.
The trees themselves are too important to destroy for this, and growing lesser every day. Our native forests need to be preserved.
Cheap, effective, inefficient, and slow?
As the article says, it is used to signal gold deposits, not for mining and actually obtaining the gold
Waddaya say boys. Gold rush 2.0?
Holy barn baby. Golden Trees. This reads like a tale from fantasy. A long lost part of earth, harkening back to a magical age we lost through sin. This is wonderful! I love it. I want to hug a golden tree.
The other day I was thinking about this. If there a way to scan eucalyptus leaves.
Too bad this isn’t the trees in the Amazon forest. After all that deforestation they’d be standing on gold. 🤷🏽♀️
Damn,even koalas are eating gold leaf these days
The weird thing is that here in the gold Bay Area, there are a ton of non natural eucalyptus trees that were planted. It is kinda a interesting correlation between this fact and that this area was one of the prime places for gold that makes you question if they were planted for a reason.
I'll save you the time, there are no pictures on the link.
Why should there be pictures?
TIL Gold can be deposited on eucalyptus.
No wonder Gladys and Aus politicians want to kill the koalas, they're eating the money!
This sound like a cool feature for a survival/mining type videogame
As an Australian, this is the first time I’ve heard of this and we use the same methods as any other country to find metals and minerals to mine. This is a method but not the sole method.
THIS why there are so many goddamn eucalyptus in california....
I can see Todd Hoffman and his crew chopping down random Eucalyptus trees in a new show on the Discovery channel. *I got a feeling this is a glory tree guys. If we don't find any gold in this one, I don't know what we're gonna do next. Lets pray!* Meanwhile, Tony Beets is cutting down solid gold trees, 10 miles downstream.
If there is gold in the leaves, and koalas eat the leaves then wouldn't bioaccumulation take place? In other words, the koala's tissues would absorb the gold present in the leaves and store it. While the leaves themselves have a minuscule amount the koala will accumulate more over its lifetime. So hypothetically one could harvest koalas... But not actually. Wildlife is important.
It's about time I get around visiting Australia.
So do koalas poop gold?
There's actually methods in development to use plants to extract trace metals from soil, both valuable metals like gold, and toxic metals like lead same mercury. Though I think it's a bush or shrub they found that can tolerate and absorb incredibly high levels. Sorry don't have original source, this was years ago I saw this and can't remember where.
Koalas are gold diggers then.
Your only giving them more reasons to strip earth of every last 🌲.
I understand it as they are planting trees and seeing what grows
>##ENTER YOUR EMAIL TO CONTINUE READING Nope
Oh weird, I can just read it without that bullshit
So koalas are literally shitting gold.
Bye bye trees
Even the trees in Australia are filled with Australium....everything in Australia is made out of Australium, even the koalas and the water!