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You can bank
on pearls in Tahiti

A few weeks ago, after helping me moor my boat at the Papeete dock, my friend Gerard went for a walk. He'd lived in that city in the 70s and was curious to see how it had changed. He soon returned to the boat.

"That was quick," I said.

"Well, if you don't need a bank to get money for pearls, there's not much to do. The town is all banks and pearls."

I don't know if the Society Islands have more banks than average, but they do have a lot of pearls. Whether you're sailing through the lagoons, strolling down city streets or exploring small towns, the black pearl industry here rules.

The animals that create the lovely dark pearls are black-lipped oysters. These natives of Polynesia once flourished in island lagoons including Hawaii's Pearl Harbor.

Ancient Polynesians used the oysters mother-of-pearl shells to make jewelry, fish hooks and lures. Then Europeans arrived with a lucrative button industry, and local men were soon diving 60 feet or more to collect the coveted bivalves.

By the 1960s, oysters were scarce throughout Polynesia. But cultured pearls became popular around then and the black-lipped oyster became a treasured resource.

Pearl-making is a natural process. When a piece of sand or a parasite gets inside a bivalve's shells, it can usually spit it out. But when it can't, the bivalve encases the intruder in mother-of-pearl. Such entombed aliens often become a permanent bump inside the bivalve's shell, but not always. Sometimes they become a pearl.

Any bivalve can make a pearl, but our black-lipped oysters create exquisite ones in luminescent purples, greens and grays.

Of course, pearl formation these days isn't left to chance. After carefully tending young oysters until they're 2 years old, pearl farmers then introduce a "seed" into a slit made in the animal's gonad.

For the next 18 months, farmers frequently clean the outside of the oyster shells, removing parasites and marine growth that can hinder the oyster in its pearl making.

Farmed oysters either dangle on strings tied through holes drilled in their shell edges, or get tucked into little net pockets, and lowered about 60 feet underwater.

Pearl farms orange floats, each set accompanied by a hut on stilts, are common sights in the lagoons here. Boaters are careful to give them a wide berth.

Pearl farming is hard work. Since the oysters reject about 70 percent of their pearl seeds, workers must keep checking and trying. After an oyster throws out several seeds, the creature is returned to the ocean to make baby oysters.

Oysters that keep their seeds and grow pearls become bivalve royalty, and are tended lovingly for 10 to 20 years. When an aging oyster gets tired and stops making pearls, it too is set free in the lagoon to reproduce.

Gerard is right that French Polynesia is overflowing with pearls, but it's a fine, sustainable industry that I'm happy to support. And it's easy too. I don't have to look far for a bank.