Pinctada Maxima Oyster

This is the species of oyster that we use to produce South Sea Pearls, and they're the biggest oyster with the finest quality nacre. Nacre of a pearl is related to the nacre of the oyster that produces it. This oyster, the Pinctada maxima oyster, is actually quite wide-ranging in its natural habitat. It's found in much of Southeast Asia, as far as India and Sri Lanka, Burma, Vietnam, that kind of area. But the 80-mile beach pearling grounds, which are about 100 miles south of Broome, it's a population of Pinctada maxima oysters that's unequal anywhere in the world. The oyster that's used for the Japanese industry to produce Akoya pearls is a Pinctada furcata, which is a much smaller species of oyster, and they can thrive in much denser populations. They're not as susceptible to stress as the Pinctada maxima oyster. Cultivation techniques that are used for producing Akoya pearls are quite different to the cultivation techniques required for producing South Sea Pearls. The initial operation is very similar, but the farming conditions are quite different. And it was my uncle, Nick Paspali, who developed completely new techniques and completely new technologies to allow us to produce really fine-quality South Sea Pearls. To boil it down into a nutshell, it really involved taking the process to the wild pearling grounds and performing the pearl cultivation operation there. And really, from 1969 until today, it's been an ongoing process of research and development in husbandry techniques. And since the 1980s, the wild oyster population is protected by a government quota forced by the Western Australian Department of Fisheries, and the number of oysters we can collect in a year is strictly regulated. The Pinctada maxima is a species that lives in a pristine environment, in a very specialised environment. The tides up in Western Australia are among the biggest in the world. Oysters are filter feeders, and especially this species of oyster, they filter a huge quantity of water. They need a lot of nutrient-rich water to grow and thrive. I believe they filter over a tonne of water a day. Of course, filter feeders absorb any impurities in the water, and any pollution or impurities in the water will affect the health of the shell and the quality of the pearl that it produces. They can handle only a limited temperature fluctuation in the water. So really, for the Australian industry, the environmental conservation isn't just a social issue, it's an essential issue for our survival. So we are really strong advocates for the protection of the environment up there.