hey everyone,
I just wanted to know if you could make cultured pearls with any old oyster and if you could make it at home than can you tell me how to do it?
thank you
I suppose that theoretically, if you had a truly righteous saltwater tank setup, and if you were good enough at fishkeeping that you could keep oysters alive, you might be able to culture pearls at home. But normally, in order to make cultured pearls, you start with an oyster farm.
And, you need a supply of freshwater mussels to provide the nucleus.
So, no, this doesn’t really look like a home hobbyist thing.
Certainly the implantation technique is going to be the tricky thing; if you are a keen marine aquarist and are able to keep oysters, then it ought to be possible.
The nucleus doesn’t have to be made of mussel shell, that’s just what the commercial cultured pearl industry has chosen as being suitable.
thanks you guys for answering back… wow, i didn;t know you had to put that much time into making a cultured pearl. i’ve seen on tv on a home shopping network that they were putting oysters in some container and if you let it sit for a couple of years than a pearl should appear… maybe it was false advertising??
Thanks alot though for taking time to respond
I believe many mollusks are capable of producing pearls. Which one produces the best, I don’t know. However, you may want to find out which one Mikimoto, one of the pioneers of cultured pearls, uses. Ten or twelve years ago I had the opportunity to tour the Mikimoto facility, in Toba, Japan.
Watching the process was interesting. A technician surgically inserts a small pellet made from the shell of the Mississippi fresh water clam/mussel. After much trial and error this material was selected because it has the lowest rejection rate. For the oyster, the pellet, (grain of sand in nature), is like having a small pebble in your shoe, so it trys to force it out. The technician locates the pellet where it will cause maximum irritation, but be hardest for the oyster to get rid of. The secretion the oyster releases to ease the irritation is what makes the pearl. After the surgery, the oysters are placed in baskets, each in it’s own little cage, and returned to the sea.
There is a very high mortality rate, so start with a bunch. It takes a long time to grow the pearls, (can’t remember how long), and then a great many are not marketable.
You would find keeping an oyster alive for several years to be one of the most boring things you could spend time on. I know people who farm oysters… more comonly called “rock farming” - it’s about that exciting. That’s when you let the sea do all the work as far as maintaining the water and growing the food goes. Doing it all yourself would be a decade or two until you could get the technique good enough to be worthwhile. Grow rock crystals instead!
how do you grow rock crystals… i need to find something to do with all of this free time
Easiest way to grow crystals is to buy the kit. We got one here; they are simple - my box says for ages 12 and up! They just basically hang a string into an aqueus solution of simple chemical salts like monoammonium phosphate and aluminum pottasium sulfate, maybe add some food coloring, et voila, fake emeralds and such!
(I’ve got the Smithsonian Crystal growing set series 1)
Should be easy to find on the net too.
depends on what kind of rock… dissolve a lot of salt into a little water and let it evaporate, and that makes salt crystals… best if you let it evaporate in a black container, because the crystals show up very clearly then. they’re pretty, too 
Yup, I remember seeing a documentary about this. Japan seems to have invented this and it is extremely complex. Take an oyster at home, insert something, and you have a dead oyster. Not that you’d probably notice much difference. I mean, they’re not great conversationalists. I wouldn’t invite an oyster to my party. On the other hand this reminds me:
Q. What noise annoys a noisy oyster most? (Say it fast)
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The answer should be obvious…
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A noisy noise annoys a noisy oyster most! (Try saying that fast!
I know, this is GQ.
But I couldn’t pass the opportunity to mention that I used to live right next to Toba and the Mikimoto Pearl Island[sup]tm[/sup]! The famed Mikimoto oysters used to spend winter in my town.
From what I understood, the water temperature seems to be important. Which is why there aren’t all that many places where they are cultured. So add to your list of things you need: sea water that isn’t too hot in summer and too cold in winter, and a jagged coast line (preferably rias) to minimize currents. Oysters sometimes die when they hit against each other in the baskets. So I say, if you don’t live in the Ise-Shima region of Japan, forget about it.
Well, anyway, I thought I could provide some more input, but Duck Duck Goose and DaToad covered pretty much all I know about pearl farming.
It can’t be too hard… Sea World in Ohio for a while had an oyster tank, and would put on a show with divers going down all of 15 feet or so to retrieve a pearl. Every show, one of the guests would get a pearl to take home.