1983Fishing and Farming between Mountains and Seas

Chapter 468 Countless Pearls
"Really? It's quite big!" Everyone on the Fu Qiang shouted.

The pearl oyster that Liang Ziqiang pried open with his own hands had a silvery-white inner shell that was very smooth. Liang Ziqiang quickly peeled off the pearl layer, and a milky white pearl suddenly appeared, flashing in the sunlight. It lay quietly inside, but it gave people a sense of movement.

Even if natural marine pearl oysters have pearls, there is usually only one per oyster, and occasionally two.

After a careful inspection, Liang Ziqiang found that there was only one pearl in the shell. But pearls are not always harvested by quantity. For example, some pearls are too small and are not worth much even if you add up a bunch of them.

The one Liang Ziqiang was holding in his hand was estimated to be nine to ten millimeters in diameter, which was not small.

Pearls that are too small cannot be sold at a high price even in later generations, but this one would probably be sold for around two hundred yuan in later generations, and is worth several yuan even now.

A few dollars may not seem like a lot to Liang Ziqiang nowadays, but at this moment the deck under his feet is filled with piles of mother-of-pearl oysters!

Of course, he is not sure yet whether most of them contain beads.

Soon, he opened several more mother-of-pearl oysters.

I thought that this shell, which was close to one centimeter in size, was already quite large, but unexpectedly, not long after, another one was pried out, which was even larger than the first one.

There was a ruler on the boat, and Liang Ziqiang took it to measure it. The diameter was twelve millimeters!
It’s impossible for something this big to be worth only a few dollars. It’s probably worth thirty or forty dollars!

While the other crew members were sorting the fish and shrimp, Liang Ziqiang was concentrating on prying out the pearls, as if he was opening a lottery ticket.

"Hey, why is this one different in color, light yellow? Will it be more expensive?" Lin Baixian asked as he looked up and saw Liang Ziqiang had opened another light yellow pearl.

"Light yellow is not much better than white and is not valuable," Liang Ziqiang replied.

The pearls produced in large quantities by mother-of-pearl oysters are different from the pearls occasionally found in abalone. Abalone pearls are irregular in shape and colorful, while the pearls produced by mother-of-pearl oysters are mostly milky white, occasionally light yellow, but other bright colors are rarely seen.

Even so, Liang Ziqiang still saw an introduction in the picture album given by Pang Jiahui, saying that very few mother-of-pearl oysters can produce pink pearls.

Pink pearls are extremely rare and therefore more valuable.

Two consecutive nets caught a large number of pearl oysters. After the other crew members sorted out the fish, Liang Ziqiang asked them to come over and open the oysters together.

Unfortunately, even after prying out thousands of mother-of-pearl oysters, no pink pearls were found.

But nearly a thousand white and beige pearls were collected, which means that at least one pearl was produced from almost all the mother-of-pearl oysters.

This pearl content rate was beyond Liang Ziqiang's understanding. He couldn't understand why there were so many mother-of-pearl oysters on the seabed, and the probability of containing pearls was so high!
In any case, the pearls opened today alone are worth several thousand dollars.

Thinking back to the gray mark on the hand-drawn sea map, Liang Ziqiang finally understood why the captain of that ship paid special attention to this sea area.

It is very likely that before driving the seafood collecting boat, the crew member was responsible for driving the bottom trawler and accidentally discovered the secret of the abundant pearls here. So from time to time, he brought the crew here to collect shells and pry away large quantities of pearls as extra income.

For five consecutive days, Liang Ziqiang drove a bottom tugboat to dredge and salvage in this area, and the scope was constantly expanding to the surrounding areas.

Hundreds or even thousands of pearl oysters are caught every day, which shows how amazing the number of pearl oysters hidden on the seabed is.

Now Liang Ziqiang began to think, the secret of this place has been accidentally discovered, so what about the other place? Could there be something valuable at the bottom of the sea?

Since he couldn't go this time, he decided to try it out next time by trawling. After returning to the shore and selling all the fish he caught, he contacted Pang Jiahui.

When he saw such a large number of pearls, Pang Jiahui gasped at first, wondering when he had started pearl farming.

After picking up a few and taking a closer look, Pang Jiahui immediately concluded that these were not cultured pearls.

It is not difficult for him to judge the color and origin of pearls. Generally speaking, the luster of natural pearls is relatively soft, and some pearls have "hammer marks". Good natural pearls are almost translucent.

It is more obvious if you drill directly to identify it. The texture of natural pearls is consistent from the inside to the outside, and the structure is very compact, delicate and moist. The stimulus for producing pearls is very small, and some natural pearls do not even have a nucleus.

On the contrary, cultured pearls have a looser structure, a dry texture, and a more floating surface sheen, commonly known as "thief sheen." In terms of transparency, cultured pearls are far inferior.

If you drill a hole and look at it, you will find that the cultured pearl has an obvious nucleus, which is often quite large. Of course, the "nucleus-free cultured pearls" developed later are another matter.

A few days later, the fleet went out to sea again and headed straight for another sea area. They had come to look for it last time but found nothing. This time, Liang Ziqiang used a tugboat to sail back and forth and found no mother-of-pearl, but there were a lot of abalone. The abalone was okay, but not as big as the one on Wuming Island.

What he didn't expect was that the abalone that looked like an ordinary size actually contained abalone beads!

Abalone pearls are different from pearls. They are extremely difficult to form. Only one abalone pearl may appear among tens of thousands of abalones. After so many years of going out to sea, Liang Ziqiang has only obtained one abalone pearl, which is not very big.

However, this time, he only searched through dozens of abalones and found the second abalone bead.

As he continued searching, he was surprised to find that the probability of something happening elsewhere was one in ten thousand, but here it was as high as one percent, or even one in several tens!

Normally, even if abalone encounters tiny foreign objects entering the abalone meat, it is rare to successfully produce pearls. The success rate of abalone pearls in this place is so high that Liang Ziqiang can't think of a reason even if he racks his brains.

On average, he could find about ten abalone beads every day. After five days, he had collected nearly fifty abalone beads.

The color of abalone beads is not as simple as that of shell beads. Dozens of abalone beads gathered together are colorful, including blue, purple, green, yellow, and all kinds of colors. The shape is also less likely to be a perfect circle, but more likely to be various.

Moreover, most of the abalone beads were larger than the one he picked up on the nameless island many years ago.

That abalone bead was sold for two hundred yuan. Needless to say, most of the abalone beads in front of me are better than that one, so their prices will naturally be higher than two hundred yuan.

The total value of these fifty or so pills in my hand is at least over ten thousand yuan!
Now it seems that those two sea areas are indeed good places to make money.

But Liang Ziqiang was thinking along the way. Even if there were still a lot of pearl oysters and abalone beads in those two places, if he continued to haul them out one after another, sooner or later he would finish them all.

But is this really the only value of those two places?

Why is the pearl production rate of pearl oysters there so high, and the proportion of abalone carrying pearls so different from that in other places?
Liang Ziqiang is not a researcher, so he obviously cannot give an answer.

But this does not prevent him from making full use of the resources there!

As long as we continue to release small pearl oysters and small abalones into those two places, a large number of pearls and abalone beads will be produced.

There is absolutely a way to ensure a continuous source of income, making it a way to make money that lasts for ten, twenty or thirty years!

(End of this chapter)