Pearls - Saving Pearls

Impact of Human Intervention
The commercial cultivation of pearls has taught us much about what mollusks need for survival. And experimentation with ways to create bigger, better, and more pearls has taught us some difficult environmental lessons.

Over-collecting:
Pearl-producing mollusks often grow extremely slowly and frequently cannot reproduce until they are several years old. Unfortunately, for centuries, harvesting natural pearl oysters and mussels from the wild remained the primary way of producing pearls.

As a result, many of the world’s natural pearl beds have been depleted. Controlling the harvest to maintain sustainable pearl fisheries is a serious challenge, but legislation now protects many species of pearl mussels and oysters.

continue to Over-culturing

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