Pacific research aims to boost pearl farms' fortunes

[jshepherd]

Short article on Tahitian pearl farming quoting me and Josh H.

http://www.scidev.net/en/south-east...earch-aims-to-boost-pearl-farms-fortunes.html

 

[GemGeek]

That's great.

 

[Caitlin]

I am always glad when you show up as a quote! I hope to see many more of them!

 

[Cyril Roger Brossard]

Interesting, especially this part:

But Josh Humbert, owner and manager of a pearl farm Kamoka Pearl, says that large-scale producers may be harming the ecosystem.

"The larger industrial farms often employ high-power water hoses to clean them and blast anemones off the oysters. But this practice causes numerous environmental problems. While the blasting kills most of the anemones, breaking them up with powerful jets of water causes them to disperse and provokes them to multiply upsetting the ecological balance of the lagoon. Many atolls in French Polynesia suffered because of this," he says.

Instead, Humbert suggest the holistic method of cleaning the oysters where natural fish populations feeds on the anemones.

"Farmers bring the oysters to shallow zones with existing fish populations and allow them to nibble on the anemones. But this method requires labour that we often can't afford now due to falling prices."

I remember in my first post about farming in Bali Indonesia asking the forum if they thought that cleaning would eventually affect the ecosystem and possibly induce a localized degeneration of the farm.
I was told that such had no major effect.

There is no dirt, really. The strings don't normally contact the bottom. The debris consists mainly of algae, shells and the fleshy remains of organisms.

Josh seems to think differently.


but this got me puzzled:

"Water temperature and quality has a direct effect on the health of the oyster. Oysters feed by filtering tiny organisms called plankton from water. But an event called a red tide, when phytoplankton multiplies too quickly and becomes overabundant — often caused by pollution in water — is deadly for the oysters," she says.

really? pollution? as in introduction of a contaminants? plankton? Maybe the effect referred to here is blooming and subsequent anaerobic state in a localised biome, but I would hardly consider this as a pollution.