Pearl+Divers!+(period+6)

**// Pearl Mania!!!!!!! ​ //** Before the beginning of the 20th Century, pearl hunting (pearl diving) was the most common way of harvesting pearls. Divers manually pulled oysters from ocean floors and river bottoms and checked them individually for pearls. Unfortunately, not all natural oysters produce pearls. It would take nearly, making them highly scarce, and valuable! A pearl is a hard, rounded object produced by certain mollusks, such as oysters. The pearl is a valued gemstone and is cultivated or harvested for jewelry. Natural pearls are formed when a small foreign object, such as a parasite, grain of sand, or piece of food lodges itself in the gonad or mantle tissue of a mollusk or oyster.



In order to find enough pearl oysters, free-divers were often forced to descend to depths of over 100 feet on a single breath, exposing them to the dangers of hostile creatures, waves, and drowning, often as a result of deep water blackout on resurfacing. Because of the difficulty of diving and the unpredictable nature of natural pearl growth in pearl oysters, pearls of the time were extremely rare and of varying quality. []