Everybody knows what pearls are. People have been making pearl jewelry for the longest time. They are known for their beauty but many people don't actually know how they get created at all. I didn't know until just recently that they were made artificially sometimes and I had no clue there was a whole industry behind it until this year. I always thought of them as always being from wild clams and lucky to find but I guess not. That was naive of me to think in a world built on greed and quick gratification. When pearls naturally occur an oyster gets a grain of sand or a small object inside their shell that causes them irritation. The irritation causes them to secrete nacre which is the building block of pearls. Overtime the oyster keeps secreting layers upon layers of nacre which builds up overtime and forms a pearl. So artificially people have repeated the same type of process. Pearl farmers raise oysters from larvae to their finished product. China is the biggest producer of cultivated pearls every year they get hundreds of tons of pearls from different freshwater and marine species. As larvae they let them swim freely throughout the water under controlled conditions, as they start to develop they give them rocks and stuff like that to anchor themselves to once they have developed into a baby oyster. Then they wait normally a year or two to nucleate the oysters so they are sure that they are the right size and can handle it. Then they reach the stage where they need a grain of sand to reach their shell. Except instead of a grain of sand finding its way inside the shell humans do a surgical procedure on the oyster to put a grain of sand on their mantle. This process is called being nucleated. After they do this procedure they have to wait 2 to 5 years for a pearl to develop. I would be terrible at this job because there is so much waiting. On top of all this waiting it's not even guaranteed that it will work out. Many things could go wrong during this whole process. Pearl oysters are actually quite sensitive and this process requires lots of luck. The smallest change in environment could cause this operation to fail. Also, some oysters just get sick and die right away during this process or their body rejects the implant and spits it out. Marine oysters are much more sensitive than freshwater relatives so sometimes people cultivate those rather than marine oysters because it's more surefire. It's easy for pearl farmers to lose a lot of money, they have to get a good turnout otherwise they're ruined. People could easily lose their livelihoods from this and I'm sure it's happened many times. I don't really like the thought of pearl farming because I don't know if it causes oysters any harm to do that but putting a foreign object in any organism's body isn't cool to me. People can't just be doing that I mean how would they feel if a giant put something in them. Of course it's not quite a fair comparison but still I don't like it.
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