Bloodworms or bristle worms are sea-dwelling critters that hide in the seabed and come out to grab prey. They're disagreeable, territorial, aggressive creatures that fight with each other using their copper jaws.
Wait, copper?
Yup. The worms harvest copper from the sediment, transport it to their teeth, and bond it to melanin to make really good teeth. The bonding protein is called multi-tasking protein (MTP)
Now we're going to try and replicate it to create new materials.
But now I can think of a few aliens that might use metal bonding like that in other ways.
(Also, could we possibly tweak bloodworms to take up and isolate other metals?)
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