Ant and termite colonies unearth gold

Ant and termite nests show evidence of gold hidden deep underground in new research conducted by CSIRO.

  • 10 December 2012

Research published in science journals PLoS ONE and Geochemistry: Exploration, Environment, Analysis, found that at a test site in the West Australian goldfields termite mounds contained high concentrations of gold. This gold indicates there is a larger deposit underneath.

“We’re using insects to help find new gold and other mineral deposits. These resources are becoming increasingly hard to find because much of the Australian landscape is covered by a layer of eroded material that masks what’s going on deeper underground,” Dr Aaron Stewart, CSIRO entomologist said.

"We’re using insects to help find new gold and other mineral deposits."

Dr Aaron Stewart

Termites and ants burrow into this layer of material where a fingerprint of the underlying gold deposit is found, and bring traces of this fingerprint to the surface.

“The insects bring up small particles that contain gold from the deposit’s fingerprint, or halo, and effectively stockpile it in their mounds,” Dr Stewart said.

“Our recent research has shown that small ant and termite mounds that may not look like much on the surface, are just as valuable in finding gold as the large African mounds are that stand several metres tall.”

Mineral resources make up A$86.7 billion of Australia’s exports and new discoveries in many commodities are required to sustain production. After 150 years of mining, gold and other mineral deposits near the surface have been discovered and miners need new tools to explore deeper underground.

Insects could provide a new, cost effective and environmentally friendly way of exploring for new mineral deposits, avoiding the traditional method of expensive and often inaccurate drilling.

Dr Stewart’s work has also found that insects carry metals in their bodies.

“We’ve found that metals accumulate in excretory systems of termites,” he said.

“Although the insects may not concentrate metals in their bodies, they actively rid their bodies of excess metals. This process shows up as little stones, much like kidney stones in people. This finding is important because these excretions are a driving force in redistribution of metals near the surface.”

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Dr Aaron Stewart talks about his research in mineral exploration.
An entomologist in trade, Dr Stewart is now working on using termites to find new mineral deposits.

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Transcript

Aaron Stewart: 

00.00. My research is really about finding new mineral resources in Australia. The problem is that we’ve got 150 years of exploration and most of the easy to find resources have been found.

00.11. So what we need is new tools to find these resources, and there’s plenty there, and we need to be able to find them in a cost-efficient way.

00.19. So my research is using termites and ants, other insects, to get below a surface layer of transported material which is hiding our future mineral resources.

00.30. I’ve done a lot of specific research at some sites in eastern Western Australia , where we’ve looked at gold deposits particularly, and in these particular sites we’ve found that termites can reveal the gold deposits beneath cover and they can find these gold deposits where the evidence is four or five metres below the surface.

00.52. The novel part of what my research really is, is the ability to use smaller nests and nests of termites and ants which traditionally wouldn’t have been used because they look like they are not made up of that much material and what I’m finding is that they’re still able to go down and vertically transport useful amounts of material for us.

01:10. Well, from here we want to look at more different types of termites. For example there are subterranean termites, which build big nests in the base of root balls of trees and other areas. And, these nests are just as big as the nests of mound forming termites, however their below the ground.

01:27. When they forage they little earthern sheaths over branches and food sources.

01:34. Now, what my recent research has been showing is that this material is very similar to the material of these large termite mounds and so there’s the potential of using a whole new group of insects, of termites, for this research.

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