Oyster farmers dream of pearls from warming seas
ANTONELLA CINELLI
of Reuters
PEARLS may soon be cultivated in European seas for the first time ever, as Italian oyster farmers seek to exploit an unexpected opportunity offered by the rapidly warming Mediterranean.
Late last year, the first specimens of Pinctada radiata, a pearl oyster native to the
Red Sea, were spotted in the Gulf of La Spezia.
Less than a year later, they are proliferating in what have always been some of the Mediterranean’s coldest waters, more normally associated with other types of oyster used for food rather than jewellery. ‘‘We are looking into the possibility of producing cultivated pearls here,’’ Paolo Varrella, the head of a cooperative that has been breeding food oysters in the area since 2011, said.
The group had already made contact with pearl oyster farmers in Mexico to get tips on production techniques. ‘‘The Pinctada radiata has been reported around the island of Sicily since the 1970s, but only in the last decade has it moved north’’ to the cooler Tyrrhenian and Ligurian seas that lap the western Italian mainland, University of Messina ecology professor Salvatore Giacobbe said.
It is the latest in a succession of alien warmwater species to enter the Mediterranean as it heats up due to climate change. Manuela Falautano, a scientist at the Italian environmental research and protection institute ISPRA, said this trend had seen ‘‘an exponential increase’’ in the last decade.
Some of these species are aggressive and disrupt delicate ecosystems. In a few cases, such the spotted puffer fish and the scorpion fish, they are also dangerous to humans. The 2.5 million square kilometre expanse of water that separates southern Europe from Africa and the Middle East is heating up faster than the average of the world’s seas, she said.
Pearl production, more readily associated with Polynesian atolls than the northern Mediterranean, has an annual global turnover of $US11 billion ($NZ17.7b), and Italian oyster farmers are keen to cash in.
Adriano Genisi, a pearl importer for more than 30 years, said the Pinctada radiata may produce gems similar to Japan’s renowned Akoya pearls which have a diameter of 5mm9mm and a white colour with shades of grey, pink and green.
If all goes well the first pearls could be harvested in about a year.
Franco Reseghetti, a researcher at Italy’s National Institute for Geophysics and Vulcanology, said measurements taken in the Tyrrhenian in December at depths of between 300m and 800m showed the highest temperatures since 2013, and he expected to see a further increase this year.