Tina wondered if perhaps nobody here is interested in pearl oysters.
Well, speaking for myself, I *did* find it interesting, especially as
I had never seen the process illustrated before. But I doubt that all
and sundry are interested in knowing what I think !! A pity the Olympus
pages don't have a *like* facility such as fuzzbook has :-)
As to
their cost; these cultured pearls are really cheap, compared with the
wild ones.
Pearls in molluscs arise though the animals protecting
themselves from the irritation of a foreign body which has somehow got
into the space between the two shell halves and which really bother the
animal. They have no means to eject the foreign body. But what they do,
is to coat the *thing* with a covering of the same nacreous substance
that their shell is made from, and all is soft and smooth again. Or vice
versa.
*Wild* pearls as found in the Torres Strait decades ago, were
discovered through the harvesting of millions of oysters from the sea
floor by divers hired cheaply, each one opened manually and searched for
the rare animal into which a grain of sea-sand had found its way. The
shells and meat of all were discarded and only the pearls retained.
The cultured variety that Tina observed are each having an annoying
grain or two of sand inserted for the animal to coat with nacre..
Imagine having a grain of sand under your eyelid, with NO possibility of
removing it.
EVERY oyster yields one or more. Cheep cheep !!
Brian
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