What is a natural pearl, and how are they formed? Natural pearls form when some kind of irritant, usually a small organism, makes its way into the shell of a mollusk like an oyster or a mussel.

For at least 164,000 years, oysters have been part of the human diet, but people have been finding pearls in oysters for much ...

A great irony of pearl history is that the least expensive ... To reduce irritation, the mollusk coats the intruder with the same secretion it uses for shell-building, nacre.

A retractable foot, a siphon for sucking up water, powerful muscles, and, sometimes, a pearl. And you thought ... clams are bivalves, a kind of mollusk that's encased in a shell made of two ...

This creates a material called nacre, also known as mother-of-pearl, which encases the irritant and protects the mollusc from it. When pearls are cultured commercially an irritant is manually inserted ...

When a mollusk senses that its shell has been invaded by an irritant, it creates a substance called "nacre," or what we commonly refer to as mother-of-pearl. Nacre inside the shell traps and ...

What is a natural pearl, and how are they formed? Natural pearls form when some kind of irritant, usually a small organism, makes its way into the shell of a mollusk like an oyster or a mussel.

Get Instant Summarized Text (Gist) The evolutionary history of mollusks has been clarified through a genome-based reconstruction of their family tree, resolving long-standing debates. The study ...