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Pinctada fucata, the Akoya pearl oyster (阿古屋貝), is a species of marine bivalve mollusk in the family Pteriidae, the pearl oysters. Some authorities classify this oyster as Pinctada fucata martensii (Gould, 1850). [1] It is native to shallow waters in the Indo-Pacific region and is used in the culture of pearls.
The term keshi (occasionally misspelled Keishi, apparently a confusion with "Heishi beads") was first used in Japan to refer to pearls without nuclei. Akoya pearl cultivation, which began in the 1920s in Japan, provided numerous small, most often greyish pearls as a by-product. Traders from India, where natural pearls were harvested and ...
Black South Sea pearls, or Tahitian pearls come from the black-lip oyster; gold and silver South Sea pearls from the gold-lip and silver-lip oysters; and Akoya cultured pearls from Pinctada fucata martensii, the Akoya pearl oyster. Pearls are also obtained in commercial quantities from some species of the closely related winged oyster genus Pteria.
The original Japanese cultured pearls, known as akoya pearls, are produced by a species of small pearl oyster, Pinctada fucata martensii, which is no bigger than 6 to 8 cm (2.4 to 3.1 in) in size, hence akoya pearls larger than 10 mm in diameter are extremely rare and highly priced. Today, a hybrid mollusk is used in both Japan and China in the ...
By the 1840s, the export of the shells was as valuable as the pearls extracted from them; the nacreous shells were used to make mother-of-pearl buttons for clothing. In 1874, compressed air diving equipment made harvesting the oysters easier. By the early 1900s, some 200,000 to 500,000 oysters were being harvested annually. [10]
Edible molluscs are used to prepare many different dishes, such as Oysters Rockefeller (pictured). This is a partial list of edible molluscs.Molluscs are a large phylum of invertebrate animals, many of which have shells.