Looking For Pearl Oysters

[cfoster]

I am looking for someplace in which to purchase live oysters that have pearls inside of them. I have found many sites with offer "Wish Pearls" in which the oyster comes to you in a can which is filled with an solution that kills the oyster (I presume to keep the smell down for people who just want to open an oyster and get a pearl out). I however am looking for living oysters that I can order that have a pearl inside of them. Can anyone direct me to a place in which I can purchase this product?

Thanks,
Charles

[jshepherd]

Hello Charles,

This is actually difficult to do. The reason is there is a little known fact about these pearls that most people do not know. The pearls are actually inserted into the oyster and THEN placed in that solution which preserves them. This is the only way to ensure that the oysters will have a pearl every time. This was the companies that sell oysters with pearls are able to ensure that the pearls will be of high quality, and have different colors. So the pearls that you 'find' in the oysters at all of those little kiosks around Hawaii and the US did not actually form inside the host oyster that you are opening.

If you are looking for pearls within a live oyster I would suggest contacting islandpearls.net. This is a company within the US that deals in Akoya pearl farming locally. It would not be possible for you to transport living oysters from Asia with or without pearls on any large scale.

[mhotalin]

Does anyone know why the scientific reason that some oysters pearl and others do not?

[Kenji]

This can be answered two ways depending on whether you are referring to natural pearls or cultured pearls.

Natural pearls are formed completely by chance. This is why they are so rare. They are typically formed when a parasite makes its way through the outer shell of an oyster, through the mantle tissue picking up a few epithelial cells on its journey, to its resting place in the gonad. The epithelial cells picked up enroute then form the pearl sac that envelopes the parasite and forms a pearl.

Today we no longer rely on this chance occurence. Pearls are now always cultured. The reason some oysters, even after the culturing process, may not have a pearl is that some oysters will refect the nuclei and spit it out. A large percentage of nucleated oysters will do this. The only way to tell whether or not an oyster has a pearl is to x-ray it. We do this here in Japan. But, even with the x-ray it is impossible to tell whether or not the pearl is of good or poor quality.

This is the reason that the pearls are implanted 'as pearls' in the oysters that are sold as 'oysters with pearls'. If the oysters were sold with a pearl inside that the actually produced, it would be quite rare to find good-quality pearls. By implanting a pearl they know that there will always be a good pearl within those oysters.

The reason that the oysters are placed into the formaldahide solution is two-fold. Yes, it does preserve the oysters indefinitely. But it also kills the oyster and makes the oyster constrict, closing its shell after the pearl is inserted. This was the oyster can be opened in front of the customer as though it grew the pearl itself.