Thinning may solve the problem, Müller says, because lower shell density usually results in a higher quality pearl. "In effect, the farmers will be getting more with less," he says. Others feel ...

A retractable foot, a siphon for sucking up water, powerful muscles, and, sometimes, a pearl. And you thought ... a kind of mollusk that's encased in a shell made of two valves, or hinging parts.

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 ...

A great irony of pearl history is that the least expensive cultured pearl product in the market today rivals the quality of the most expensive natural pearls ever found. The price-value anomaly is ...

A jeweller has turned a pearl that a woman’s partner found in a bowl of mussels at her birthday dinner into a pendant.Paige Hawkins’ partner found the pearl in his meal while they were celebrating at ...

Pearls are made by marine oysters and freshwater mussels as a natural defence against an irritant such as a parasite entering their shell or damage to their fragile body. The oyster or mussel slowly ...

Pearls are the result of a mollusc's reaction to irritants such as parasites that enter its shell. Although model pearls are perfectly round and smooth, in reality they come in a huge number of shapes ...

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. To protect itself from the invader, the mollusk ...