Shucking awesome: Woman finds 50 pearls in oyster

Brett Smith for redOrbit.com – @ParkstBrett

Always chew your food. You might make a few hundred bucks in the process.

A guest at Puckett’s Boat House restaurant in Franklin, Tenn. got a little more than she bargained for this week when she shucked into an oyster only to find a pearl, then another, and another…

In total, the woman found 50 pearl inside a single mollusk.

50 shades of pearl (Yeah, we’re reaching. It’s Friday.)

Finding a single pearl in an oyster can happen from time to time, but 50 is pretty much unheard of. Oysters actually form pearls when they get something foreign in their shell, making the fact that these pearls ended up in a lady’s mouth just a bit more ironic.

Eric Horton, the customer’s server at the time, told local TV station WKRN that when he realized what was going on, he grabbed a bucket and watched the tiny spheres drop into it, one by one.

“I’m one of the longer tenured people here, so having seen that, being a part of that is pretty cool,” he said.

Oyster’s may soon be just as rare

We values oysters as a source of food and pearls, but the mollusks are currently under threat by the forces of climate change. A 2013 study found that high levels of carbon in the water affect shell formation rates, energy usage and the mortality rate of young oysters.

“The failure of oyster seed production in Northwest Pacific coastal waters is one of the most graphic examples of ocean acidification effects on important commercial shellfish,” said Dave Garrison, program director in the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Division of Ocean Sciences. “This research is among the first to identify the links among organism physiology, ocean carbonate chemistry and oyster seed mortality.”

When exposed to increasing carbon dioxide in acidified water, it becomes more energetically expensive for oysters and similar organisms to build shells. While adult bivalves grow more slowly when exposed to elevated carbon dioxide levels, larvae are more significantly affected.

“They must build their first shell quickly on a limited amount of energy–and along with the shell comes the organ to capture external food,” said study author George Waldbusser, an Oregon State University marine ecologist. “It becomes a death race of sorts. Can the oyster build its shell quickly enough to allow its feeding mechanism to develop before it runs out of energy from the egg?”

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