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All species within the genus produce pearls. Attempts have been made to harvest pearls commercially from many Pinctada species. However, the only species that are currently of significant commercial interest are: Gulf pearl oyster, Pinctada radiata; Persian Gulf, [2] Red Sea, Mediterranean Sea and throughout the Indo-Pacific as far as Japan and ...
The largest pearl-bearing oyster is the marine Pinctada maxima, which is roughly the size of a dinner plate. Not all individual oysters produce pearls. In nature, pearl oysters produce pearls by covering a minute invasive object with nacre. Over the years, the irritating object is covered with enough layers of nacre to become a pearl.
Pinctada maxima oysters grow very large, up to 12 in (30 cm) in diameter. The two color varieties have different coloration in the outer edge of the interior. This mother of pearl or nacre is responsible for the color of the pearls that the oyster can produce.
Natural (or wild) pearls, formed without human intervention, are very rare. Many hundreds of pearl oysters or mussels must be gathered and opened, and thus killed, to find even one wild pearl; for many centuries, this was the only way pearls were obtained, and why pearls fetched such extraordinary prices in the past.
This produces a superior, spherical pearl. The animal can be opened to extract the pearl after about two years and reseeded so that it produces another pearl. Pearl oyster farming and pearl culture is an important industry in Japan and many other countries bordering the Indian and Pacific Oceans. [127]
This species is commonly farmed and harvested for pearls, and there is general consensus that the quality of pearls from Pinctada margaritifera is the highest quality out of all the pearl oysters. Pearls form when a parasite or other irritant enters into the oyster and nacre is released by the oyster to coat the object, eventually creating a ...
By the 1840s, the export of the shells was as valuable as the pearls extracted from them; the nacreous shells were used to make mother-of-pearl buttons for clothing. In 1874, compressed air diving equipment made harvesting the oysters easier. By the early 1900s, some 200,000 to 500,000 oysters were being harvested annually. [10]
Mise's brother was the first to produce a commercial crop of pearls in the akoya oyster. Mitsubishi's Baron Iwasaki immediately applied the technology to the South Sea pearl oyster in 1917 in the Philippines, and later in Buton and Palau. Mitsubishi was the first to produce a cultured South Sea pearl – although the first small commercial crop ...