Pearl farming

Pearl farming

Today, the cultured pearls on the market can be divided into two categories. The first category covers the beaded cultured pearls, including akoya, South Sea, and Tahiti. These pearls are gonad grown, and usually one pearl is grown at a time. This limits the number of pearls at a harvest period. The pearls are usually harvested after one year for akoya, 2–4 years for Tahitian and South Sea, and 2–7 years for freshwater. This perliculture process was first developed by the British biologist William Saville-Kent who passed the information along to Tatsuhei Mise and Tokichi Nishikawa from Japan. The second category includes the non-beaded freshwater cultured pearls, like the Biwa or Chinese pearls. As they grow in the mantle, where up to 25 grafts can be implanted on each wing, these pearls are much more frequent and saturate the market completely. An impressive improvement in quality has taken place over ten years, with the former rice-grain-shaped pebbles largely replaced with the near-round pearls of today. More recently, large, near-perfect round bead nucleated pearls up to 15 mm in diameter have been produced with metallic luster.