Pearl Farm

MFT: Seeing pearls gathered from oysters      
LFP: NO BOAT TOUR and too much rain

So today we were supposed to go on a boat tour of the lagoon and see a couple of new islands and a motu or two. It was perfect day for me to tag along with the students and gather lots of data. However, things were still pretty up in the air come morning, so I was told to pack everything I could possibly need during the day for a range of different fieldwork. Of course, as soon as I got everything ready, it turned out that the boat operator had canceled.

So instead they arranged a half-day car tour of the island with a stop at a pearl farm. Mangareva is very well known for pearl farming. We got to go see this one farm where the owner showed us around. He owned over 24,000 hectares of oyster farming. On a given day they process over 400 oysters! Most oysters due to seeding have a pearl and about half of the pearls are quality pearls (a pretty good percentage!). It was fascinating watching the different steps of the process. My favorite was watching the guy pull out finished pearls (and then put in a new nucleus/seed for more pearls to be made). It was something else to see the beautiful black tahitian pearl come out. About 50% of the time the pearl is good enough to keep. They are really gorgeous.

The pearl farm is out on a stilt house in the lagoon (think Stiltville in Miami). We ended up staying for a while due to bad weather (you take a boat out to stilt-house. It was really interesting talking with the workers about their job. A lot of them get training at the pearl school in Rangiroa. The very sad thing, however, was that we couldn’t actually buy any pearls there. We have to buy them in Tahiti (after they are quality tested for a certain nacre thickness). This means major markup in price and an inability to purchase the pearls from the specific pearl farmer we visited. Its too bad — because most of the students (myself included) would have been very happy to spend some money on the pearls!


We spent the rest of the very rainy day driving around the island (took about 2 hours due to poor roads) and then returned to the boat. I went back on board instead of having dinner on shore, and had the lovely surprise of vegetarian jambalaya for dinner in honor of Fat Tuesday. Plus for breakfast we had beignets! (ok more like popovers but still very yummy). Tonight we have a movie night (woot) and popcorn (I bought some yesterday for the ship). So it should be a nice evening all around. 

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