More interesting, perhaps, is the biological process that occurs for the pearls to form. When debris gets trapped in between the shells of an oyster or other mollusk, or when the animal sustains ...

akoya oyster populations should return to health, probably by the year 2002. Thinning may solve the problem, Müller says, because lower shell density usually results in a higher quality pearl.

Nucleating an oyster. The Chinese have also ... Will they buy Chinese pearls if the roundest examples are nacre-coated shell beads instead? How will such new products be positioned in the market?

A natural pearl will form in an oyster when a foreign object, like a grain of sand, gets inside the shell. To protect itself, the oyster will coat the unwelcome visitor with layers of nacre ...

Mother-of-pearl is the hard, silvery, internal layer of several kinds of shells, especially oysters, the large varieties of which in the Indian Seas secrete this coat of sufficient thickness to ...

Watch Andreia Salvador, Curator of Marine Mollusca, take a look at one of the Museum's most extraordinary and precious pearls. Among the millions of bivalve molluscs in the Museum's collections, one ...

This taken on Nov 24, 2022 shows a Pinctada maxima shell and pearls at the scientific research trial breeding project in ...

In waters of a southern Chinese island, scores of palm-sized pearl oysters hang tidily on the breeding cages. These ...

This file photo taken in May 2023 shows the pearls produced by oysters, scientifically known as Pinctada maxima, at the scientific research trial breeding project in Changjiang Li autonomous ...