国家地理-2008-08-04 海湾地区重兴珍珠采集业（在线收听）

Tucked away in the United Arab Emirate’s northernmost region, a very delicate experiment is underway to bring some luster back to the region’s pearl industry. Since 2005, one company has been cultivating pearls commercially, the first such modern operation of its kind in the Gulf.

 “Well, for thousands of years, the whole region depended and, depended totally on pearl fishing. And within a few years, let’s say that two decades, because of the discovery of oil and the invention of pearl culture, the whole industry collapsed.”

 Al-Suwaidi says that the UAE is the first Gulf nation to renew pearl cultivation, and for good reason. His stock of over 100,000 pearl-producing mollusks are kept in pans and painstakingly cleaned and tended, increasing their potential to grow and produce large high-quality pearls.

 Oysters are a very delicate species of mollusk whose lives and prosperities are measures of the environmental conditions they inhabit. Al-Suwaidi’s business partner, Imura Daiji, says the link between the pearl and its environment is very important. The bigger and healthier the pearl oyster, the larger the pearl it can produce.

 “Oyster pearl cultivation and the environment is a very very deep relationship.”

 The untouched quality of this protected ecosystem has allowed him to see a faster span of production time than he had seen in Japan, the birthplace of the industry.

 In years past, pearl divers would plunge without apparatus more than 100 feet beneath the sea, making as many as 30 or more dives a day with only an estimated…