And here I am again, adding the finishing touch on what is my version of the legend of “El Mechudo”. My story is different from all previously released versions, as it has no supernatural elements (“Satanic intervention”).
To add this new twist on the old legend, I will present the evidence used throughout this Blog’s series of “The Legend of El Mechudo”: from the place where these events unfold, to the demystification of the “claws of death” and now the “silent killer” (in this case: it is not stress). I -for one- simply cannot believe that an experienced diver was caught by a pearl oyster and then he just drowned. It takes something much more lethal than a pearl oyster to drown a proffessional pearl diver.
Therefore: if it was not the Devil himself nor a pearl oyster… What really caused the tragic death of “El Mechudo”?
As Delilah to Samson
Just as the biblical Samson, our mythical diver had a magnificent mane of hair which probably had some special meaning to him. And I have reasons to believe that his long hair was partially responsible for his untimely death. If Delilah was the one responsible for bringing about Samson’s misfortune, who was this Sonoran diver’s Delilah? Let us review a bit about the pearl oyster’s natural history to better understand what might have happened.
Habitat of the “Panamic Black-Lip Oyster”
The Black Lip Pearl Oyster -known as “Madreperla” in Mexico- is Pinctada mazatlanica, a bivalve that is found attached -by means of its byssus-to rocks, encrusting corals and other bivalves. As it was shown in the previous post’s video, it is not very difficult to detach them from their anchoring spot. As for the oyster’s habitat: I really do not percieve any danger for a long-haired diver here.
Do remember that “El Mechudo” is said to have secured his long-hair (probably with some rope or even turning his own hair into a knot), but it is not difficult to imagine it could have come loose after hours of diving. Here is where the danger truly resides.
For anyone who has dived or snorkeled in the waters of the Gulf of California, is easy to remember that there’s really nothing in the water or the sea-bed that can entangle you. Due to the lack of rivers reaching the Gulf, there are few contributions of earth-bound material such as tree branches and shrubs, and it is not easy to entangle your hair between stones, so where’s the danger? Let us analyze the next species and its habitat.
The Habitat of the “Rainbow Lip Oyster”
The “Concha Nácar” or “Rainbow Lip Oyster” (Pteria sterna) is a very special animal in regard to its “taste” for settlement. It is adapted to a wide variety of habitats: rocky and coral reefs, on top of the shell of other bivalves, forming “carpet clumps” on sandy-muddy areas and –especially- they can be found living on gorgonian -or fan- corals. Additionally, their byssus is much more stronger than that of the Black-lip pearl oysters, and it takes a lot more effort to detach them from their anchoring spot.
Final Remarks & Video
A fan coral is the “perfect trap” for a long-haired pearl diver. During the shooting of the video about this legendary character I used a doll with a “wig” (one of the most difficult things I’ve recently done: I’d rather juggle with sea urchins anytime), and everytime the fake hair was near the fan coral it would easily entangle itself, becoming a small burden to dissentangle the hair for a new video shoot.
Additionally: I have a video that shows how an oyster is unable to keep their shells closed on an object for more than just a couple of hours. The test was performed, with the help of my assistant Antonio “El Tigre” Mendoza, who helped to perform experiments -both under natural & “laboratory” conditions- and we obtained consistent results in “oyster retention”: usually of less than 60 minutes on each tryout.
The following video was produced in order to show you how the oyster releases its grip after some time. For this I used one of my son’s “GI Joe” action figure, around which we devised a floating system (to simulate the upward flotation pull of a victim) and continuous video filming was performed until the oyster released its “little victim”. As a note of interest, you will notice that there are a couple of “curious sea-hares” (Aplysia californica) that appear during the video…this might be as close as they can get to become part of a “feature film”, hence the attraction (I guess).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTg8ld0hWoU
Thus, based on all the information we have talked about during this series of blog entries (and in the best “Clue” game fashion) I dare say the following:
“El Mechudo” dove to deeper waters to try and release a “Rainbow Lip Oyster” that was attached to a large fan coral (these larger specimens are usually found in deeper waters) but his hair became entangled. He could not use a knife to cut his hair free (because slave divers were not given such a weapon)…thus the great Yaqui diver drowned. Satan must be declared blameless.
The only way the body of this diver could have remained in the same site for days or weeks (once the body fills with gases form decomposition it would float away) is if it was firmly attached to a coral…any oyster would have released the hand of a dead diver within hours.
I Finally I have the data from this year’s pearl harvest and it is a positive report but not a spectacular one. As it has happened for several ongoing years, environmental changes -possibly caused by global warming and other natural processes- have directly affected the outcome of our pearl harvest. This year was no exception since 4 years ago we had a very poor “spat collecting” season of "Rainbow Lipped Pearl Oysters" (Pteria sterna), which did not allow us to have an adequate amount of mature (2 year old) pearl oysters to “nucleate” or “implant” two years ago (2009) and the amount of pearls we obtained was of only 1.7 kg when our goal is to reach 4 kilos (roughly: 4,000 pearls)
However, the number of nucleated oysters would have given us only 1 kilo of pearls this year, but thanks to improvements in our nucleation technique we were able to achieve a 70% higher amount of pearls, and the colors and quality of the pearls were truly good. I will now proceed to to review each type of pearl produced this year in our Bacochibampo Bay Pearl Farm… We harvested 1,783 cultured pearls with an average size of 9.0 mm (in diameter), the smaller size of the pearls was 8.3 mm and was larger at 12.9 mm. The predominant shapes were baroque (asymmetrical), followed by semi-baroque pearls (symmetric) and with a small minority (2%) of round and near-round shapes. In the next photo we can see the two plastic bags on which the entire 2011 crop is placed until the time comes for its separation by size, shape and quality (pearl grading). I proceeded to "liberate" the pearls to appreciate their shapes, colors and sizes… And these from bag # 2… I also “cherry picked” some pearls that had something that made them all the more strikingly beautiful or unusual and these are some pictures of these pearls: However, these are not the only beautiful pearls, their colors are just much more intense, but these are other rare gems: Now for the next sub-topic within the crop: the production of Mabe Pearls or “Half-Pearls”. This kind of pearl is “harvested” (extracted) from the shell of the oysters and -unlike loose pearls- they must be processed before being sold. In fact, this entire process is quite elaborate and I want to explain it in detail in a future Blog entry. I hope I can do this by September, as I am preparing a video of the process as well. Since I am going to explain this in the near future, I will avoid going into much detail, but each pearl oyster has the potential to produce up to 3 Mabe(some rare ones up to 4), but we consider that only 50% of the extracted Mabe pearls will have the right quality to become a "Cortez Mabe"; what about the remaining pearls?… they will visit the mermaids (cast into the water’s depths). Why? Because we will simply not sell "junk pearls" to our customers and our pearls are guaranteed for life: we just don’t want people coming back to exchange a defective product, we want them to come back for more beautiful & enduring gems. How many Mabe pearls did we harvest this year? According to harvest data we obtained 6,158 “raw” (or “in the shell”) pearls… from which we will further inspect and will end up with only 3,000 pieces of varying qualities: from "B" to "AAA" grades, and possibly some 6 “U” grade Mabe pearls. Once mounted in jewelry, mabe pearls take on a completely different look … The natural pearl harvest this year was quite low, barely reaching 3 pearls with a size of at least 5 mm in diameter. This is a good number, considering that the norm in nature is of just 1 such natural pearl per every 10,000 pearl oysters. Keshi pearls -a type of cultured pearl- were also very scarce, with an output of just 33 grams. I hereby terminate this report of the Cortez Pearl Harvest of 2011. The next blog post will be up by mid-September and will have information about the third edition of the "Pearl Ruckus" organized by Jeremy Shepperd (of “Pearl-Paradise.com” fame) which took place in Hollywood, California. Cultured Pearls
These are from bag # 1… 
Mabe Pearl
Keshi Pearls and Natural Pearls
Until next time!
A couple of weeks ago I had the chance to review CIBJO‘s new Pearl book (also known as the “Blue Book”). For those not familiar with this “famous” book or who CIBJO is, let me present this information in a simple way: CIBJO is an international confederation of national jewelery trade organizations, and amongst the many services they provide the offer guidance (guidelines) on how to refer to when you sell or market a product that falls into their umbrella: mainly gems and jewelery. Stated in another way, a jeweler might use these CIBJO guidelines to sell his products in the most honest/honorable way possible. It can also be used by the client to demand more information on the product of interest. Unfortunately, the most common issue is that both client and vendor are unaware of this valuable source of information, or what is worse: that the jeweler/seller exploits the ignorance of the customer to achieve a fraudulent sale.
The fraudulent sale of gems of all kinds, diamonds, rubies, emeralds and pearls, is more common in developing countries, and this is partly due to low awareness among the general population about the characteristics and attributes of gemstones which they seek to acquire. To this we add the greed factor of many and/or their total ignorance and/or the fact that they too were “ripped off” and so we end up inside a great well of unease and distrust. Not one, nor two … but dozens of times we have witnessed some deception and fraud in jewelry sales, and for us -pearl producers and jewelry makers- this issue becomes more sensitive in cases involving pearls.
For this reason, and to celebrate the publication of the new CIBJO-Blue Book: Pearls (this link allows you to download the PDF file directly from CIBJO) we will discuss about the various “myths” that allow for the deception and fraud in the purchase or acquisition of pearl jewelry. We hope that this series will indulge to your liking… even to your dislike (some will end up with a terrible feeling after reading these series of articles), but my hope is that this will help you to avoid a terrible mistake or being cheated and deceived. So, let’s start with this series of “myths” …
Myth # 1: “Majorca Pearls”
This is probably the most common myth or fraud of which we are known. How many times have we had a visit from a proud owner of a double-string necklace of “Majorca Pearls”? Countless times. How many times have we been told how when they visited the island of Mallorca, Spain, they even had a chance of visiting the “pearl farm” and could see how the oysters were stripped of their beautiful “pearls”? Again: countless … and how many times have we had to repeat that “Mallorca pearls” are just false, simulated or imitation pearls or -isn’t French just great at making things sound so romantic?- “Faux Perles“? Untold times. In fact, my favorite phrase is: “The only part of a ‘Majorca Pearl’ that is truly Pearl can be found in its trade name” (McLaurin dixit).
But hey! Don’t take my word for it, but instead… use the CIBJO Pearl Book and just go to page # 6 in paragraph 4.4.4 entitled “Imitation or Simulated”, and it unmistakeably identifies them as fake pearls. There, clearly mentioned, are the brand names of the most common imitation pearls, and it states how you may not use these to deceive a customer and -in this particular case- they HAVE TO BE described as follows: “Imitation Majorica Pearls”. So we have have an international authority that confirms that these famous “pearls” are simply … imitations. And this in itself is no problem unless you are told that if they are either natural or cultured pearls: then it is FRAUD.
How could the problem have started? In most cases -such as in department stores- the person in charge of selling the items does not have the foggiest idea of what they are actually selling: they have been equally trained to sell diapers and jewelry -in the best parrot-like way- but they have been told what to say from others that don’t know a thing about pearls. But this does not exempt them from fraud … and it does not matter if the jewelry item (be it a necklace or bracelet or earrings) came with a certificate of authenticity: a review of its text will inform you that they are not real pearls, but most of the time it will employ such verbiage “semi-cultivated pearls” or “Made using Marine materials”. This will be discussed in more detail in the coming weeks.
Akoya Pearl vs. Faux Perle