In Raja Ampat, pearl farming balances business and ecological sustainability

Photo by Basten Gokkon/Mongabay. Retrieved from news.mongabay.com

Tucked in the curve of a bay in Indonesia’s Raja Ampat archipelago, a floating structure appears like the tip of an iceberg. Below the surface, it’s teeming with oysters bearing pearls.

Marina de Olivera Kaesnube, 27, is about to start her workday on a January morning. Her office is the floating cage that holds thousands of Pinctada maxima pearl oysters. She has one job to do, but it’s arguably the most important: injecting a bead, known as the nucleus, into each oyster’s tissue. It’s around this nucleus that the oyster will secrete layer after layer of nacre, eventually yielding a highly prized pearl.

“Besides earning a living, I decided to join because I was interested in learning about pearl oyster farming, especially in this surgery process,” Marina tells Mongabay.

The marine ecosystem of the Raja Ampat Islands in the Indonesian province of West Papua forms a global biodiversity hotspot, with much of its waters still healthy. This tiny archipelago is a natural habitat for pearl oysters in Southeast Asia, where pearling has a long history. In the nearby Sulu and Celebes Seas and Aru Islands, harvesting of pearls from oysters in the wild is the main form of the pearling industry.

Throughout centuries of pearling, there was little thought given to the long-term sustainability of grabbing oysters from the seafloor, shucking them open to get the pearl, and killing them in the process. It was commonly believed that depleted oyster populations would replenish quickly from untouched stocks in deeper water, but that didn’t happen. What did, though, was that harvesters saw a decline in the quality of pearls. But when companies in Japan developed and perfected their pearl breeding and culturing methods, the industry turned right back around.