If i had the right Oyster could i culture a pearl?

[Kabong]

It whould work whouldnt it?
Any one know what type of oyster you whould use?

[krayzie]

hmmm.... that would b harder then it actually is, seeing how expensive perls are n all

but id love 2 c wat the others say

[flex13]

I am not sure if this is true but I have heard you put 1 tiny grain of sand inside. The grain will start to iritate it. So it will put I guess the pearl coating to smooth it out. Then he keeps adding and adding now you have a pearl and a BLING BLING lol Now I don’t know how long that will take but I am sure it takes a long time if this is true

[luceneck]

I saw a special on this a few months back. You could probably do it at home but it would require a ton of info on how they feed, temps, current, etc...

Anyways, the pearl itself is a calcium type coating that the oyster makes over any type of foreign matter within its body. At one time small buddha statues were inserted into them to make small pearl buddhas. In the end they found out that the best material to insert into a oyster to make a pearl was a chunk of another oysters flesh. I don't know why, but having a small round chunk of another oysters flesh is more likely to produce a peal then the other foreign items. These bad boys are aquacultured and having a perfectly round pearl is not very common.

I may also be very wrong, but I think that is a summary of what I remember.

[luceneck]

http://library.thinkquest.org/10236/see.htm

[PoukieBear]

That would be so cool! i wonder shy no one else has thought of this.

[zoltetov]

I'm just guessing, but I think it's not done often because I can't imagine an oyster producing a pearl in a matter of months. It's probably a matter of years.

[ab5ebdxer]

I think it has to be the right type of oyster also, but I am not sure.

[Rodeo Clownfish]

I think most of the oysters that produce pearls are temperate species. Although, now that I think about it I'm probably wrong. Certainly Tahiti has a huge market in black pearls. It probably has more to do with keeping the oyster alive long enough. I remember seeing tanks at Six Flags when I was a kid that had oysters in them and you could pay a buck or something, choose an oyster and maybe get a pearl. My nieces were at Six Flags a couple of years ago and they had the same thing except that the oyster was canned (what is the world coming to?!?). She got what looked like a nice pearl in her canned oyster.

I've wondered about this before. I would think it is doable in the right tank environment. My guess is that you couldn't just buy a live oyster from the grocery store though.

Speaking of that, has anyone ever put in a live animal from a grocery store and kept it alive a while? You know, a lobster, oyster or clam?

[szwab]

the hard part would be keepng the oyster alive. It's done in the ocean pearl/oyster farms. They do the whole proccess down to seeding the oyster with the sand to starrt the proccess.

[TimD]

Hey, I've had steamed oysters at the raw bar and chomped down on tiny pearls, so it can't be that difficult a process. I think it would just be the husbandry of the oysters that would cause problems for your plans.

[Kabong]

Well aparently if you can get a hold off
"Pinctada margaritifera var. Cumingui"
Its the one they use in Tahiti to produce the black pearls

I bet ya TBS could come up with something suitable doing this.

[ledford1]

I believe it takes 20-24 months for a cultured pearl to be created. Also, the bigger/older the oyster, the bigger the pearl. Many oysters don't even survive the process, and only a small fraction produce a quality pearl. People seed oysters with the shell of another because it is the material least likely to be rejected.

Just a few tidbits of info to add...

[ledford1]

More info...

My wife is a gemologist in the jewelry biz. When I told her about this thread, she had to contribute :

(In descending order of pearl size)

- South Sea pearls are highly prized and are produced by Pinctada maxima. They are found in Australia, Indonesia, and the Phillipenes. The oyster can be nucleated 1-3 times. Only 10-30% of the pearls are spherical. Being from warm water, the pearls form quickly and have a satin finish.

- Tahitian pearls, black pearls, are another highly prized pearl produced by Pinctada margaritifera. They are found in French Polynesia and Cook Islands. The oyster can be nucleated 2-4 time. Only 40% of the pearls are spherical.

- Akoya (a Japanse word for oyster) pearls come from Pinctada fucata. They are found in Japan and China. The oyster can be nucleated 1-5 times. 70-80% of the pearls are spherical. Being from cooler waters, the process takes longer, but the pearls are more lustrous.

These saltwater oysters can only take one nucleus at a time, unlike freshwater oysters that can take up to 50. Another interesting note is that the longer the nucleus is in the oyster, the less likely it is to be spherical (that's why the price jumps significantly for larger pearls).

There are also such things as Conch pearls, made by Carribean Queen Conchs. There are also Melo pearls from the Melo Melo Sea Snail. These types of pearls are oddly shaped, not spherical. They are neat, but not worth as much.

[donald altman]

you can go to disney land and for 20 dollars get a oyster or clam out of a holding tank, open it up and pop a farmed pearl out of it...The reason pearls cost so much is becuase it takes so long to make a good peice of jewerly. A 1 inch length of average pearls has about 4 to 5 pearls in it... so imagine an 18 or 22 inch necklace... also imagine how many clams that turned out no pearls and those that had to be gone through to find the perfect round pearl with unblemish colors..... it would probably take hundreds of clams to make one necklace and each of those clams had to have over 2 years of culturing time. you add the gold clasps the labor involved in drilling and stringing each necklace by hand..

[ManEatingGuppy]

yes, all it takes is a grain of sand for a oyster to produce a pearl but culturing it is hard. an oyster is like a electric clam, they are very picky eaters and they neeed alot of it. if it was possible, pearls wont be so expensive. if u wanna try it, u can use any oyster, also u have to put the sand or peice of broken shell on the mantle

[jcoopergd]

Wow! A thread i can put my two cents into -

Having visited a pearl farm in Tahiti (on the atoll of Manihi), we witnessed first hand how black pearls are cultured.

First thing to say - 99% of Black Pearl's are aqua-cultured. Farmers plant pieces of American Osyter shells (that are cultured just for this reason - they are perfectly spherical - via machining)

Then, they get dropped in hanging water baskets in the middle of the Manihi atoll.

If my mind remmebers correctly, the grow time is from 4-6 years, and the success rate was fairly low -

Now, even though most pearls are not spherical when they come out, they still aint cheap! I picked up a large oblong one, with some big visible defects for about $300 american. (And that was a steal!)

Course, add the $10,000 vacation, and you have yourself a pretty dam expensive pearl...

ALso, remeber - the color of pearl is determined by the color of the mantle of the host oyster - the black ones from tahiti have beautiful shells - and the pearl farms are on beaches that are covered in beautiful oyster shells...

anyways, if anyone is interested, i have a few pics from the farm that show the farmers inserting a nuclie into the young oysters, and taking out pearls from the old oysters... PM me if you want pics..

j

[donald altman]

post them here. post them here !!!

[SaCe]

I just did a search for "pearl" because in the middle of the night last night I was up, and decided to take a look in my tanks with a flashlight. I believe I found a pearl laying on the bottom of my small 18 gal tank. All that is in this tank is a Mantis, two Blue Damsels, Live Rock and Live Sand. Could this pearl have come in on some Live Rock? I don't know anything about how pearls are formed. I just know, I believe I found one. I recently took out a piece of Live Rock and put it in my larger tank and on it was a different type of shell growing on it. I know nothing of any of this type of thing so could this shell thing be an oyster? I'm totally inexperienced when it comes to this.

[SaCe]

Here are pictures of the pearl in my tank. Should I take it out? Also, what else should I do with it? Does it need anything special to preserve it?

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v3...esPearl021.jpg

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v3...esPearl019.jpg

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v3...esPearl018.jpg

[WaterKeeper]

Originally posted by PoukieBear
That would be so cool! i wonder shy no one else has thought of this.

Oh, but they have. A thread from last week Pearls

[szwab]

i'd say someone is playing a pretty good joke on you
but then again anything is possible..

[SaCe]

szwab, I don't know if you meant that post to be directed to me or not, but the other two people (my husband and son) who live here could care less about my tanks, and never even pay attention to them. I know they wouldn't have put it there. They are so into there own lives they wouldn't even think of it. I know them well enough to know that. It got there some how, but not by anyone around here.

[Kaikaboy]

It may be hard but it can be done. In San Francisco there is a store chain the sells oysters with a perl in it for 10 dollors. Its quite a crude idea that you pick out an oyster, shuck it open just for teh perl but hundreds of tourists do it every day. In saying that and due to the fact that the store garentees each oyster has a perl I almost bet the store adds the sand to the oysters in a tank and lets the perl develope. as far as the Perl goes from watching discovery channel the oyser will create a pearl in a few months but it will be very tiny and it does take quite some time for the pearl to grow to any conciderable size.

as far as how to raise a oyster in your aquarium.. I dont know =)

[szwab]

just thinking that pearl looks awefully big to come out of something on the live rock. my comment wasn't meant to be offensive. Just hard to think of how it would end up in the tank otherwise. have you pulled t out to look at it? a pick of it out of the water referenced by a common object.

the store most likely purchases the oyseters already seeded from a farm. It would cost much more than 10.00 to culture a pearl in a tank