A gem of a breakthrough: Florida research institute develops technique for culturing queen conch pearls

摘要

In their natural form, conch pearls are among the rarest pearls in the world—it takes about 10,000 queen conch to find one conch pearl and only 1 in 100 of those will be of gem quality.For more than 25 years, all attempts at culturing pearls from the queen conch {Strombus gigas) have been unsuccessful - until now. For the first time, novel and proprietary seeding techniques to produce beaded (nucleated) and non-beaded cultured pearls from the queen conch have been developed by scientists from Florida Atlantic University's Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute. With less than two years of research and experimentation, Drs. Hector Acosta-Salmon and Megan Davis have produced more than 200 cultured pearls using the techniques they developed. Prior to this breakthrough, no high-quality queen conch pearl had been cultured, and this development opens up a unique opportunity to introduce a new gem to the industry.