Nautilus pearl

[pattye]

How perfectly delightful! HAPPY NEW YEAR!

 

[GemGeek]

I agree with Pattye!

 

[Lagoon Island Pearls]

Me too. Happy New Year, Steve.

 

[DrTKStern]

Photo of perfectly round GIA certified Nautilus

Photo of perfectly round GIA certified Nautilus

Hello, All,

While there have been doubters, Steve Metzler's find of a nice blister Nautilus pearl should reassure them that Nautilus can in fact make pearls. The photo attached was taken by the Van Pelt Studio in Los Angeles. The pearl has been certified by GIA as a Nautilus pearl.

For those of you new to this thread, we knew from historical records of the Sultanate of Sulu and North Borneo that on less than 10 occasions in the past three centuries, Nautilus pearls were presented to the Sultan by his people. We suspect they come not from Nautilus pompilius, but from Nautilus suluensis, a smaller but otherwise identical animal roaming the depths of the Sulu Sea.

Princess Yolanda's family has been in charge of shell and pearl trading for about 1,000 years. Come speak with her in Tucson, where she will be giving several presentations at the Arizona Gem Show at the Arizona Hotel, including about her new book, Sex and the Wild Pearl.

You can find a schedule of talks in earlier posts on this thread or the thread "Tom Stern's Natural Pearls."

Regards to all,
Datu Tom

 

[SteveM]

While there have been doubters, Steve Metzler's find of a nice blister Nautilus pearl should reassure them that Nautilus can in fact make pearls. The photo attached was taken by the Van Pelt Studio in Los Angeles. The pearl has been certified by GIA as a Nautilus pearl.

For those of you new to this thread, we knew from historical records of the Sultanate of Sulu and North Borneo that on less than 10 occasions in the past three centuries, Nautilus pearls were presented to the Sultan by his people. We suspect they come not from Nautilus pompilius, but from Nautilus suluensis, a smaller but otherwise identical animal roaming the depths of the Sulu Sea.

Tom, thanks for posting the image, a higher resolution than posted earlier in the thread it would seem.

Re blisters it's a complex issue, not so cut and dried. Hope we can talk about it at greater length in Tucson. It seems these are coming only from Indonesia, I have presented five such examples to Peter Ward at University of Washington, who has studied Nautilus for 40 years throughout the Indo-Pacific and not seen other examples. Likewise, it seems we have been finding Nautilus candidates (M. Abominabilis) with greater frequency than the Sultan.

Validity of the GIA certification continues to rest on obtaining consensus with the European labs. The blisters, while interesting, do not solve their primary objection of the pearls being composed of an aragonite microstructure that differs from any such material found thus far in the Nautilus shell (or any other large mollusk, for that matter). Thus, the negative hypothesis (if not Nautilus, then what?): Abominabilis.

Not to say that the 'link' won't eventually be found (working!!)…

PS Check your copy of The Pearl Trader by Louis Kornitzer. On page 69 Kornitzer, working in Jolo, was in my opinion presented a Nautilus pearl but discarded it as non-nacreous, likely clam claiming to be coconut. Clearly, if he had kept it the Sultan would have wanted a word with him…

 

[DrTKStern]

Tom, thanks for posting the image, a higher resolution than posted earlier in the thread it would seem.

Validity of the GIA certification continues to rest on obtaining consensus with the European labs. [/I].

Nope...I'll go with GIA and the man who looked at 700,000 pearls a year for a decade or more.

The burden in my view is to disprove GIA, not the reverse. You and I both know Nautilus pearls exist, and that all of the elements for formation exist in the animal. I know where our Nautilus pearl came from and for a second pearl have the actual shell.


Respectfully,

Tom

 

[SteveM]

I'll go with GIA and the man who looked at 700,000 pearls a year for a decade or more.

The burden in my view is to disprove GIA, not the reverse. You and I both know Nautilus pearls exist, and that all of the elements for formation exist in the animal. I know where our Nautilus pearl came from and for a second pearl have the actual shell.

All living organisms produce concretions that may or may not be called pearls according to local custom—that Nautilus would produce such has never been in doubt! And I do not doubt that the pearl in your prior post is Nautilus, nor any number of my own. But we must be objective.

The European labs also look at many thousands of pearls, including any number of Nautilus pretenders. The problems with the GIA certification are serious, amply evidenced by certification of a crossed-lamellar specimen (among aragonite microstructures, C-L is not one produced by Nautilus), published by Hubert Bari in Pearls.

I too have pearls and the Nautilus shells from which they were purportedly found, including date, location and name of the diver.

In all of science there is as yet no successful extraction of DNA from a pearl, much less matching of same to a mollusk genome, but as a result of recent meetings at University of Granada a renewed effort is currently underway at CNRS France.

Let's cross fingers. Between us I'm sure we have sufficient candidates for sacrifice should the process prove promising (I've already crushed one).

 

[GemGeek]

Nautilus suluensis -- very interesting. Who knew that this would become a grand obession? Tom & Steve -- the true nautilus hunters!

 

[SteveM]

Nautilus suluensis -- very interesting.

It was Peter Ward and his co-researcher Bruce Saunders that ultimately clarified Nautilus taxonomy, with the help of modern molecular biology, in 1997. Turns out, there is Nautilus?and Allonautilus (Ward and Saunders, 1997) (previously known as Nautilus Scrobiculatus). Just two genera and a grand total of about five species?all that remains of Nautiloidea, together with Ammonoidea, one of the most dominant and durable classes to ever roam the face of the earth.

 

[DrTKStern]

Nautilus p. sulensis

Nautilus p. sulensis

Chambered Nautilus Taxonomy​

Scientific classification
Kingdom: Animalia

Phylum: Mollusca

Class: Cephalopoda

Order: Nautilida

Family: Nautilidae

Genus: Nautilus

Species: N. pompilius


Binomial name
Nautilus pompilius
Linnaeus, 1758
Subspecies
Nautilus pompilius pompilius
Linnaeus, 1758
Nautilus pompilius suluensis
Habe & Okutani, 1988

Synonyms
Nautilus repertus
Iredale, 1944


The Chambered Nautilus (Nautilus pompilius) is the best known species of nautilus. The shell, when cut away as in the photograph below, reveals a lining of lustrous nacre, and displays a nearly perfect equiangular spiral. It has primitive eyes compared to other cephalopods, mostly because they have no lens. Their eyes are comparable to a pinhole camera. It has about 90 tentacles and no suckers which is also different from other cephalopods. This nocturnal animal has a pair of rhinophores, which detect chemicals and uses olfaction and chemotaxis to find its food.


Subspecies
Two subspecies of N. pompilius have been described:

Nautilus pompilius pompilius
Nautilus pompilius suluensis N. p. pompilius is by far the most common and widespread of all nautiluses. It is sometimes called the Emperor Nautilus due to its large size. The distribution of N. p. pompilius covers the Andaman Sea east to Fiji and southern Japan south to the Great Barrier Reef. Exceptionally large specimens with a shell diameter of up to 268 mm[1] have been recorded from Indonesia and northern Australia. This giant form was described as Nautilus repertus, however most scientists do not consider it a separate species.

N. p. suluensis is a much smaller animal, restricted to the Sulu Sea in the southwestern Philippines, after which it is named. The largest recorded specimen measured 148 mm in shell diameter.[1] This means about 4 inches, whereas the Emperor Nautilus can reach the size of a cantaloupe.NOTE THE PRESENCE OF BOTH NACREOUS AND NON-NACREOUS MATERIAL ON THE INTERIOR SURFACE OF THE SHELL, AN OBVIOUS AND FOR ME INCONTROVERTIBLE DEMONSTRATION OF THE FALSE ARGUMENT BEING RAISED BY SOME EXPERTS ABOUT HOW A NAUTILUS COULD NOT BE THE SOURCE OF A PEARL.

Tom

 

[SteveM]

Tom, thanks but that's beyond the point. Nautilus is undergoing evolution as we speak, as Nautilus is unable to traverse deep water and the resulting isolation of localized populations results in speciation. Thus far molecular biology does not support anything beyond the two genera (Nautilus and Allonautilus), of which Allonautilus (formerly 'Nautilus Scrobiculatus/King Nautilus') has been determined to be a Nautilus derivitive, despite its more ancient appearance.

As far as non-nacreous material, it's more complicated than nacre vs. non-nacre, as nacre is just one of a handful of observed aragonite microstructures, of which the only one that can be reasonably eliminated as a possibility from Nautilus is Crossed-Lamellar (the microstructure responsible for 'flame' in conch, tridacna, cassis, etc).

Classic crossed-lamellar is the appearance of certain pearls that have been certified Nautilus (ref Bari), certifications based on hearsay/provenance, leading to the outcry from the other labs.

That is at the crux of our little mystery here, and why it is so darned important that a scientific solution be found.

 

[SteveM]

Posting again to remind everyone that we're all on the same page here. That is, how to explain that every recorded sighting of a Nautilus pearl—from pioneering naturalist Georgius Everhardus Rumphius in the mid-17th century, to Kunz, to H. Lyster Jameson in the October 1912 Nature (one hundred years later, still among the most prestigious scientific journals on the planet) to the continuing experiences of Tom Stern and myself—is of a non-nacreous, or porcelaneous, object whereas the great predominance of Nautilus shell microstructure is nacre (and both types of nacre, at that). This thread has reported our process of seeking a scientifically-reliable explanation for this, including all the pitfalls and discoveries along the way.

That Nautilus pearls would be whitish and non-nacreous leaves them open game to a wide variety of whitish pearl species, Tridacna in particular, Tridacna CITES-listed and offering plenty of incentive for misnomer by even the most trusted diver.

I believe we have at least shown that Nautilus pearls are potentially unique and beautiful, despite being (apparently uniformly) 'whitish' and 'non-nacreous.' All the more reason to differentiate them from Tridacna—even the most beautiful Tridacna (which I now prefer to call Kima).

 

[SteveM]

Willey's pearl

Willey's pearl

Everyone ready for a plot-within-a-plot???

Arthur Willey's 1902 monograph on Nautilus, resulting from three years of lonely and dangerous field work in the Loyalty Islands, is the cornerstone of all modern Nautilus research and was not significantly improved upon until the 1960s. It is an obligatory citation in scientific papers on Nautilus to this day.

While Peter Ward and others have extensively paraphrased and quoted from Willey's narrative, I had not obtained a complete copy of my own until just recently. The following paragraphs are not mentioned or cited anywhere in the subsequent literature that has come my way:

Willey's Zoological Results. Part VI. (Cambridge University Press.)
August, 1902.

CONTRIBUTION TO THE NATURAL HISTORY OF THE PEARLY NAUTILUS.​

5. Mantle; Shell; Nuchal membrane.

The integument of the visceral sac has always been reckoned as part of the mantle on account of the fact that the whole of the mantle area is capable of secreting nacreous substance externally, the posterior or visceral portion in particular being concerned with the formation of the septa. The growth of the shell takes place at the free border of the pallial fold, but the whole outer surface of the fold can deposit nacre, as is indicated by the occasional appearance of nacreous intumescences on the inner surface of the shell, and also by the rare occurrence of the phenomenon of true pearl-formation, one example of which came under my observation.

Upon taking a shell, of which the animal had died and fallen out, from a basket at Lifu, something rattled like a stone in the shell. It turned out to be a handsome pearl of large size, but of doubtful value as a gem, since the shape is not quite regular, flattened on one side, and the surface is not absolutely pure. It measures about (XX) millimetres in major diameter, (XX) mm. in height, weighs (XX) milligrammes and is, I believe, the first nautiline pearl to be recorded.

Shocking? One of history's greatest scientists beheld a Nautilus pearl, a pearl subsequently ignored as somehow irrelevant. Willey's claim that it was the first such pearl is valid, as prior observations, such as Rumphius and Kunz, were not first-hand and thus relegated to myth.

Furthermore, Willey's enticing descriptions are consistent with what has been exposed in this thread: Nacreous shell blisters and non-nacreous ('not absolutely pure') pearls.

With Antonio Checa's enthusiastic assistance, I have instigated a worldwide search for Willey's Pearl, beginning with the Zoology Department at Cambridge. Willey would not have tossed it in the water. If he did not keep it for himself then it would have been archived with other specimens shipped in support of his groundbreaking research.

The opportunity to compare this pearl with others of similar provenance and recent discovery would be of incredible interest to the scientists involved. Should compositions match it would take us most of the way to the final proof this thread has sought for more than three years.

But we must find that stone?

 

[pattye]

Steve,

Following your adventures with amazement! Is Willey's work in a book form?

 

[SteveM]

Is Willey's work in a book form?

I had sought it for some time and noticed on a couple of occasions some tattered copies at used booksellers for literally hundreds of dollars. In recent days a Nautilus scientist I had not previously contacted mentioned the pearl reference somewhat tongue-in-cheek (apparently the attitude de rigueur among scientists regarding these paragraphs for most of the past century), causing my renewed search. As it happens, on August 31, 2010, Smithsonian Institution had donated a copy to the Biodiversity Heritage Library, and it is now in the public domaine. 46 downloads have occurred as of today.

 

[Marianne]

47
Marianne

 

[newberry]

48 is mine

 

[pattye]

49, the price is right!

 

[effisk]

Why do I only see 46 downloads?

 

[newberry]

Maybe because the number is not changing on that page? Three of us have downloaded it since Steve posted about it.