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Re:'Bloodworms' harvest copper for metal jaws by kragen on Friday April 29, 2022 @09:43PM (#31212619)
Not metal, metal ions, unless "mineral...copper" means metallic copper. But the paper is only about the ionic copper. This is like saying your bones are metal because they're calcium phosphate and calcium is a metal. Neat animal (Glycera dibranchiata), lying clickbait headline, as you'd expect from Vice.

Paper link: https://www.cell.com/matter/fulltext/S2590-2385%2822%2900153...

PDF link: https://www.cell.com/action/showPdf?pii=S2590-2385%2822%2900...

"Extended PDF" link: https://www.cell.com/matter/pdfExtended/S2590-2385(22)00153-... (which appears to be the regular PDF plus 13 pages of supplementary information but for some reason is 5 times as large)

Re:'Bloodworms' harvest copper for metal jaws by adrian_b on Saturday April 30, 2022 @04:27AM (#31214337)
You are perfectly right.

As soon as I had seen the misleading title about "metal jaws", I was going to make the same comment.

Unfortunately, this kind of stupid title about "metal" body parts appears periodically in popular science publications, whenever the topic is about animals which use skeleton reinforcing minerals that happen to use manganese, iron, copper or zinc ions, instead of the (more commonly encountered in skeleton minerals) ions of calcium, silicon, strontium or barium.

There are a few bacteria which are able to reduce some metallic ions to the corresponding metal (e.g. silver ions to metallic silver), with the purpose of precipitating the metal ions from the water and thus avoiding the toxic effect of those metallic ions.

However, there are no known living beings, except humans, which are able to build useful structures using metals.