Fish for Gold With Fish?

In a weird twist of a scientific update scientists in New Zealand are using fish to find gold in the river systems in New Zealand. No, this is not a pig to truffles situation where the fish are literally "sniffing out" the gold. This is more so a "follow the fish populations" situation.

You may or may not be aware that over time, bodies of water can move. For example, in the United States, the Mississippi River's path has changed since the Civil War as seen by the placement of some of the bridges from that time period. Anyway, the same thing occurs in other countries and can be faster or slower depending on a number of things including but not limited to soil type, speed of water flow, density of life (both sedentary and motile), and proximity to tectonic plates. In the case of the Otago region of New Zealand.

In the 1990s, a biologist and a geologist at the University of Otago found a type of Galaxias fish that lived on both sides of the drainage divide separating the Otago and Southland. The two realized that they could use the rate of genetic divergence between the fish and the other populations of Galaxias fish in order to determine the date of reversal. This helped them understand why the neighboring Southland contained significant gold deposits despite having less gold-bearing rock than Otago (which is renowned for its gold deposits). Combining the fish and rock knowledge of these two scientists, they were able to determine likely areas in which gold deposits could be found.

Getting to the gold is a completely different issue as they suspect that the shifts in the river water have moved rock and soil so high over the deposits that extraction would be difficult. Either way, who knew that following the changes in population of a fish could lead to gold?

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