Pearl Guide

Pearls in the Web of Life – Part 3

In our last entry, where we learned that the outside of pearl oysters acts as a small ecosystem in itself, but now we will “dive deeper” into the oysters themselves to find that this pattern repeats itself -in a kind of Hermetic understanding of the “As is Above, is Below” law- but with different actors involved. And, if you ever had the opportunity to stare into a live and open pearl oyster, you would begin experiencing a calmness that emanates from these...

This is a Special Educational entry, but I believe it may be of value to some of our new visitors; it originates from an email I received just a week ago, but I have received this type of e-mails many, many times before... so, I will take this opportunity to have this information to the widest audience possible. The e-mail would say something like this:

Hello!
I'm writing from X country to ask you:
Some time ago I had lunch at a seafood restaurant, and I found a pearl inside a...

MILAN, ITALY: October 27, 2021 — With less than one week to go to the opening of the 2021 CIBJO Congress on November 1, 2021, the seventh of this year’s CIBJO Special Reports has been released. Prepared by CIBJO’s Pearl Commission, headed by Kenneth Scarratt, the report provides a broad overview of an industry that has been dealing with the dual challenges of COVID-19 and climate change for the past two years, with perspectives from Australia, Indonesia, French Polynesia, Mexico, Bahrain and...

You have probably seen those photos of beautiful pearls that have been "cut in half" so you can see their inner structure, and you probably wondered how those are worked: are they sawed off? maybe a machete?


Well, wonder no more! This little video explains in detail how you can make your very own, very nice...pearls in half.

You will need:
Sandpaper sheets, one of each: 60 (very rough), 80 (medium grit) and 220 (fine grit, also called "water sandpaper").
Scissors
A small container...

Directly from Dr. César Lodeiro's Pear Research Group in Ecuador (October 12th, 2021):

The Research Group in Biology and Cultivation of Mollusks of the Technical University of Manabí (INBICUM-UTM), delivers the second experimental harvest of Mabe Pearls from Caráquez (about 500 units) to the Mayor of the municipality of Sucre, Province of Manabí, Ingrid Zambrano, as a partial product of the "Strengthening Project for the development of the cultivation and production of Mabe pearls in the...

In a sense, pearl oysters might be a “small ecosystem” of their own, a self-contained biome where a tug of war ensues and leads to eventual stability. But why does this happen? And does it hurt the mollusk? One of my Marine Biology teachers -Dr Fernando Manrique, a friend of Jacques Cousteau- once told us that the Ocean was teeming with Life, and that the hardest thing for many lifeforms to find was an “available apartment”, a place to settle and that would help them avoid being tossed...