PEARL CULTIVATION
The art of pearl cultivation is a long and delicate process. Man has been trying to unlock the secret of the pearl’s beauty for as far back as 1000BC, but it wasn’t until the early 1900’s that Kokichi Mikimoto successfully grew a pearl. There are two main cultivation processes known as Nucleated Cultivation and Non-nucleated Cultivation, used for saltwater and freshwater pearls respectively.
The Nucleated Cultivation process is used in Australia. Australian pearls are formed in the following way.
First, there is the gathering of the oyster shell. The process of culturing pearls begins at sea. Australian oysters are not yet conceived on farms,young oysters must be found in the wild and collected by divers on the sea bottom off Australia’s north west coast. The oysters are gathered with the aid of the pearl boat, which serves as the drivers’ platform and transports several thousand live oysters in its holding tanks. There are two long booms (about 10 meters long) that extend out from the side of the boat, each holding towropes.
Then, with the aid of the booms, as many as six divers can operate simultaneously on the bottom of the ocean floor depths of seven to 20 meters across as the boat drifts along with the tide. On board the pearl boat, the oysters are counted, cleaned and weighed, then placed in a window sized metal frame between layers of nylon netting. The panels hold between six to nine shells. The oysters are then transported in a saltwater tank to a holding area, where the frames are attached to the sea bottom in order to recover from the stress of their capture.
In a few months, the panels are lifted back onto the boat where the oysters are opened and seeded by a technician. The technicians, predominantly Japanese, have honed the implantation process to a delicate art form.
The process involves inserting into the oyster a nucleus and a tiny piece of mantle cut from a nearby oyster, the nucleus is made from with shell taken from North American mussel and the mantle is the part of the fleshy oyster lip that secretes the nacre. It has been found tht the shell of the North American mussel is the best material for the pearl nuclei because it is least likely to be rejected by the oyster. However, due
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