FORT PIERCE — Two treasure Coast scientists have solved a mystery that for decades has been wrapped up in the coils of a conch shell.

With less than two years of research and experimentation, Megan Davis and Héctor Acosta-Salmón, both scientists at Florida Atlantic University’s Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute in Fort Pierce, have developed a technique to culture, or grow, pearls inside queen conchs.

In nature, only one in 10,000 conchs produces a pearl, and only one in 100 of those is gem quality. Davis and Acosta-Salmón have an 80 percent success rate culturing pearls in conchs and so far have produced more than 200 using techniques they developed.

Officials at FAU say the accomplishment is comparable to the development of cultured oyster pearls by the Japanese in the 1920s.

Davis doesn’t expect conch pearls from Harbor Branch to start showing up at jewelry stores in malls across the country anytime soon, if at all; “but at some point I could see them going to places such as Tiffany’s,” she said, “or jewelry stores in the Caribbean or the (Florida) Keys that specialize in fine, locally produced jewelry.”

Because they’re so rare, natural conch pearls can be worth up to $3,000 per carat for the highest-quality specimens: dark pink ones with the sought-after “flames” glowing in the gem. Usually, the pearls in various shades of creamy white, pink and coral, are worth about $1,500 per carat.

Davis doesn’t know how much cultured conch pearls will be worth, simply because there aren’t any on the market yet, but cultured oyster pearls have about 30 to 50 percent of the value of natural pearls.

If that’s the case, the highest-quality cultured conch pearls from Harbor Branch could be worth up to $1,500 or so per carat, with most worth from $450 to $750 per carat.

Davis said a “faculty start-up business” to market the pearls is being started, with proceeds, like those of other marine-related businesses at Harbor Branch, to be plowed back into the conch program and help pay for other activities at the nonprofit research center.

Davis has been working with conchs nearly 30 years, first to raise them as food in the Turks and Caicos Islands. She started thinking about cultivating conch pearls a few years later.

“A lot of people have tried it,” she said, “without much success.”

Davis came to Harbor Branch in 1996 and continued working with conchs as well as spiny lobsters and marine fish. In 2006, Acosta-Salmón arrived as a post-doctoral student with 12 years experience working with pearl oysters. He left Harbor Branch recently to become an associate scientist at Centro de Investigaciones Biológicas del Noroeste in La Paz, Mexico.

Davis’s expertise with conch, and Acosta-Salmón’s knowledge of oyster culturing proved the right combination to develop conch pearl culturing.

“The breakthrough was how to do the seeding,” Davis said, “and how to make sure the animal retains the seeding.”

The seeding process for conchs is similar to that of cultured oyster pearls: A nucleus, a 5-milimeter ball of nacre (also known as mother-of pearl, the shiny, hard inner shell of a mollusk) from a freshwater mussel, plus a small piece of mantle — the strip of soft tissue just inside the opening of a conch’s shell — are placed inside the body of a conch. Male or female, doesn’t matter; Davis and Acosta-Salmón have used queen conchs because the species tends to produce pinker pearls. The nucleus is an irritant to the conch, which covers it with layer upon layer of nacre, forming the pearl.

A perennial problem had been that the spiral shape of the conch shell makes it virtually impossible to reach the gonad, the pearl-forming portion of the animal. How she and Acosta-Salmón dealt with that quandary, Davis said, is “proprietary information.”

It takes about a year to make a 2- to 3-carat pearl, about the size of a green pea.

So far, Davis and Acosta-Salmón have produced about 200 pearls of various size and quality. The biggest so far: 14 carats.

“But it’s not a high-quality pearl,” Davis said, displaying the beige, not-so-glisteny gem.

Davis now is focusing on perfecting the process and finding ways to produce pearls in desired colors.
By Tyler Treadway, TCPalm.com

Tags: conch, experiments, Florida Atlantic University, harbor branch oceanographic, pearls, research, scientists

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