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 ...

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 ...

Scientific American is part of Springer Nature, which owns or has commercial relations with thousands of scientific publications (many of them can be found at www ...

Its best freshwater pearls fueled a ready market overseas ... membrane (the lip of mantle tissue) with a nucleus of shell or metal into an oyster's body or mantle causes the tissue to form ...

About 200 years ago pearl mussels were harvested for, as the name suggests, pearls. However, the name can mislead - only about one per cent of them contain this hidden 'treasure' (and most of ...

Before the development of plastic, buttons were made from mussel shells. Freshwater pearls are still cultured by inserting small pieces of native mussel shell into oysters. Mussels are fascinating ...

To enhance the freshwater pearls created in the Wabash River, they were shipped to Japan. “If you look at the side of a fresh mussel shell, it is real bright mother of pearl coloration.

Oysters and clams are two very popular edible mollusks or bivalves. Although they have many similarities between them, there ...

The largest Scottish freshwater pearl found in living memory has been ... like a grain of sand, gets inside the shell. To protect itself, the oyster will coat the unwelcome visitor with layers ...

Repair of injured turtle shells can be difficult and time-consuming. This article describes how to manage the freshwater turtle in this phase of healing and how to keep fracture sites 'water-free'.

What is it? Well, many of the manicures feature this ethereal, pearly, opalescent finish, a bit like the mother-of-pearl-insides of a mollusc shell. So there, I’m calling it: shell nails are ...