Pearls are made by marine oysters and freshwater mussels as ... into a mollusc to promote the production of mother-of-pearl. Nacre can form naturally around almost any irritant that gets inside the ...

More interesting, perhaps, is the biological process that occurs for the pearls to form ... little shell beads or donor ...

A retractable foot, a siphon for sucking up water, powerful muscles, and, sometimes, a pearl ... Like oysters and mussels, clams are bivalves, a kind of mollusk that's encased in a shell made ...

Among the millions of bivalve molluscs in the Museum's collections, one specimen stands out: a large oyster shell, donated to the Museum ... and in turn became a unique pearl. Pearls take a long time ...

A great irony of pearl history is that ... Nucleating an oyster. The Chinese have also begun to nucleate some of their freshwater mussels with shell nuclei implants in both the creatures' bodies ...

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.

Pearls form when a foreign substance ... the same material that forms the oyster's shell, around the irritant. Over time, these layers accumulate, creating a pearl. The nacre layers are extremely ...

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 ...

What is a natural pearl, and how are they formed? Natural pearls form when some kind of irritant, usually a small organism, makes its way into the shell of a mollusk like an oyster or a mussel.

This Earth Day (April 22, 2025) marks the online launch of a groundbreaking documentary, City of Shells: Our Forgotten Oyster ...