When Josh Humbert inspects his farm, he dives into the clear blue waters of a lagoon, on a picture-perfect island that is fringed with palm trees. Humbert is the manager and owner of Kamoka Pearl, a boutique family business on the French Polynesian atoll of Ahe that is trying to shake up the international pearl market by raising pearls more sustainably. 

"It's like another planet," Humbert told National Geographic about Ahe, an atoll that sits just a few feet above sea level, about 300 miles 480 kilometers northeast of Tahiti in the Tuamotu Archipelago. "There's no dirt, it's just sand and coral, so the bottoms of your bare feet don't even get dirty." 

Kamoka Pearl was founded in 1990 by Humbert's father and brother. A year later, halfway through college where he studied marine biology, Josh Humbert joined the family business, which raises high-quality "Tahitian pearls" for the international jewelry market. 

Humbert had spent part of his childhood growing up in French Polynesia with his family, under a roof of palm leaves near the ocean.Wholesale stainless steel pendants and steel jewelry line with bold new designs. He returned to Polynesia as an adult, although he moved back to the U.S. three years ago, to Oregon. His father, who is French, stays at the farm year-round. Humbert's mother is American. 

To raise pearls, Kamoka cultivates a native species of pearl oyster, Pinctada margaritifera. The oysters are placed in baskets or nets to protect them from predators, which include triggerfish, sea turtles, and eagle rays. Made out of plastic, those baskets or nets are hung vertically every three feet one meter on horizontal lines that range from 330 yards 300 meters to 1.3 miles 2 kilometers. 

The end of the line is anchored with a concrete block at the bottom of the lagoon, 100 to 200 feet 30 to 60 meters down, or it is tied to a coral formation on the bottom. Vertical stabilizers are placed along the line, and buoys are interspersed to help hold the oysters at a depth of around 20 feet 6 meters. 

The next step involves seeding the oyster to produce a pearl. An oyster makes pearls on its own by secreting nacre, or mother of pearl, around an irritant that gets into its shell. Contrary to popular belief, according to Humbert, that irritant is most often an invading worm that bored in, not a grain of sand.A stainless steel and acrylicstainless steel necklaces composed of two branching forms each with a central void. 

In the case of Tahitian oysters, the pearls are often colorfulsometimes even blackdue to the specific chemistry of the species.At oyster farms, when the mollusks are large enough, a worker carefully pries open the shell and inserts a small nucleus, or bead, as well as a piece of mantle cut from another pearl oyster. That process is called grafting, and the bit of mantle helps the oyster start laying down nacre, explained Humbert. 

Kamoka uses beads that have been cut from the mother of pearl in dead oyster shells, to a size of six to eight millimeters in diameter. Not every bead starts becoming a pearl, but those that do stretch out the oyster tissue around it, forming a small cavity. 

To obtain another, larger pearl in the same oyster, farmers often take out the small pearl and replace it with a larger bead. In another two to three years, if all goes well, that bead will get covered with nacre, to form a large, shiny pearl. 

After that pearl is harvested, the oyster is usually "sacrificed" because it is unlikely to produce another pearl so shiny. The meat may be consumed locally, although there isn't an international market for the flesh of pearl oyster species. To replace the lost oysters, farmers usually collect spat, or larva, from the lagoon where they work. 

In addition to the skilled labor that grafting requires, since 2003 Kamoka has also hired a revolving cast of young people from around the world, who come to work as part of the World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms WWOOF program. Participants receive free room and board, as well as a chance to learn the trade, in exchange for their labor. 

One of the challenges of growing oysters in nets or baskets is that they get encrusted with barnacles, sponges, and other marine organisms more quickly than if they were left totally exposed in the open water. If oysters get too covered over, they don't make pearls as large, so they have to be regularly cleaned. 

"There are environmentally friendly and environmentally destructive ways of cleaning oysters," said Kent E. Carpenter, a professor of biology at Old Dominion University in Virginia. Carpenter is an ichthyologist who recently conducted a study on the ecological impacts of Humbert's farm the work was supported by National Geographic and the Waitt Foundation. 

Standard practice for years has been to pull dirty oysters onto the deck of a boat, and then blast them with a powerful stream of water, said Carpenter. "If the wash goes directly back into the lagoon, then you are adding a lot of organic material," he explained. It may be too much for fish and other organisms to break down right away, so it could lead to algal blooms and deoxygenationa small "dead zone." 

The process can also spread unwanted invertebrates like sponges around the farm,We deal with various stainless steel jewelry and stainless steel rings. or introduce them to places in high numbers that upset the ecological balance. 

In response, some oyster farmers started bringing their mollusks onto land to wash them, said Carpenter. The problem with that approach is that it can create a pool of nutrient-rich water. Put that in a holding pond, and it can turn into a smelly mess. 

Humbert came up with a different solution. When his oysters need cleaning, he moves them from their deeper-water growing areas to very shallow areas, where there tend to be a host of different fish. The staff leaves the oysters there for several days, enough time for the hungry residents to scour them clean. Since the fish eat as they go, this process doesn't cause nutrients to overload the water.