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Pearls
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| A LITTLE INFORMATION ABOUT THE PEARL A pearl is a hard, general spherical object produced within the soft tissue (specifically the mantel of a living shelled mollusk. Just like the shell of a mollusk, a pearl is made up of calcium carbonate in minute crystalline form, which has been deposited in concentric layers.
The ideal pearl is perfectly round and smooth, but many other shapes of pears (baroque pearls) occur. The finest quality natural pearls have been highly valued as gemstones and objects of beauty for many centuries, and because of this, the word pearl has become a meatphor for something very rare, very fine, very admirable, and very valuable. | PEARL INDUSTRY  Today, almost all pearls used for jewelry are cultured by planting a core or nucleus into pearl oysters. The pearls are usually harvested after one year for akoya, 2–4 years for Tahitian and South Sea, and 2–7 years for freshwater. This perliculture process was first developed by William Saville-Kent who passed the information along to Tatsuhei Mise and Tokichi Nishikawa from Japan. The nucleus is generally a polished bead made from freshwater mussel shell. Along with a small piece of mantle tissue from another mollusk to serve as a catalyst for the pearl sac, it is surgically implanted into the gonad (reproductive organ) of a saltwater mollusk. In freshwater perliculture, only the piece of tissue is used in most cases, and is inserted into the fleshy mantle of the host mussel. South Sea and Tahitian pearl oysters, also known as Pinctada maxima and Pinctada margaritifera, which survive the subsequent surgery to remove the finished pearl, are often implanted with a new, larger nucleus as part of the same procedure and then returned to the water for another 2–3 years of growth. | |||||
| PEARL HUNTING When Spanish conquistadors arrived in the Western Hemisphere, they discovered that around the islands of Cubagua and Margarita, some 200 km north of the Venezuelan coast, was an extensive pearl bed. Before the beginning of the 20th Century, pearl hunting was the most common way of harvesting pearls.  Divers manually pulled oysters from ocean floors and river bottoms and checked them individually for pearls. Not all mussels and oysters produce pearls. In a haul of three tons, only three or four oysters will produce perfect pearls. Today, you might be able to find a specialty store usually near the coast that offers you a chance to open a mollusk shell and discover a pearl that has been cultured, but it will cost you for the opportunity.In the past couple of decades, cultured pearls have been produced using larger oysters in the south Pacific and Indian Ocean. The largest pearl oyster is the Pinctada maxima, which is roughly the size of a dinner plate. South Sea pearls are characterized by their large size and warm luster. Sizes up to 14 mm in diameter are not uncommon. South Sea pearls are primarily produced in Australia, Indonesia and the Philippines. | PEARL COLORS  | |||||
| MORE PEARL INFORMATION http://www.pearl-guide.com/ The Wikipedia, will provide additional information to the above which are excerpts from the Wikipedia site. Images were found on Wikimedia Commons |
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Latest page update: made by dancingflowers
, Aug 30 2009, 10:57 PM EDT
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