Mother of pearl

“The oyster stirs, a silent plea,
To coat the grit, with pearly sea,
Layer by layer, a glistening coat,
A lustrous gem, the shell will tote.

With each caress, the nacre grows,
A shimmering sheen, the beauty shows,
A pearl is born, from pain and strife,
A treasure found, a precious life.”

(Excerpted from an artificial intelligence poem generated by a Google Search conducted Nov. 21, 2024, apparently based upon my search history.)

A speaker at an annual meeting of the Organization of Biological Field Stations (OBFS) once described the world’s field stations as a necklace of pearls adorning the Earth. His metaphor focused on the idea of places of enormous worth and beauty strung across the globe. But the metaphor opened up as I thought about it.

A pearl protects the soft tissue by encapsulating an invader in mother of pearl, or nacre. Nacre consists of aragonite, a form of calcium carbonate and the stuff of which coral reefs are made, and conchiolin, a harder material found in oyster shells.  Through its immune response, an oyster can transform a parasite into a thing of beauty.