world pearl

Tongareva leads world pearl technology

COOK Islands black pearl technology is advancing in leaps and bounds, putting the Tongareva Marine Research Centre at the fore front of the world’s black lip pearl hatcheries.

Tongareva, is the traditional name for the remote northern island of Penrhyn.

The breakthroughs in raising black lip pearl spats have been made by locals - Ben Ponia, lan Bertram and Dorothy Munro Samatua, all graduates in marine ecology working with Marine Resources.

The Centre can now “easily produce several hundred thousand spats each year, so there is real potential for expansion on Penrhyn,” says Ben Ponia.

Ponia says this will mean Penrhyn pearl farmers, who are using just one-tenth of the 110 square kilometre farmable area in the lagoon, can expand their operations with the healthy spats being produced there.

In 1995 Ponia says they began investi gating hatchery technology for black lip pearl oysters with a unique set up - there were no fancy temperature controlled holding tanks.

Instead the Centre’s tanks are outside, “so we had to develop protocols which suited our operation,” says Ponia.

By the end of ‘95, the local team had developed larval rearing technology and the first successful spawning.

In 1997 the team, with some help from an overseas consultant, made break

throughs in feeding regimes.

“Since then we have able to mass pro duce several hundred thousand per run each month”.

What they’re now tackling is how to keep those thousands of tiny spats alive

once they’re transferred into the ‘nursery stage’ - when they placed in cages in the lagoon. “We’re still not happy with our survival rate in the nursery stage,” says Ponia.

Despite this, the Tongareva Centre recently had its first commercial sale - 40,000 spats were sold to locals. That fig ure is significant.

It gives some indication what Penrhyn will be producing next pearl harvest after including the 120,000 or so shells collect ed from the lagoon’s wild stocks.

Penrhyn is poised to make a record harvest.

“We sold it to them relatively cheap, we are not looking to making a profit, we’re just developing appropriate tech nology,” says Ponia.

He says the Centre’s operations are not cost effective and the “future ambition is to corporatise the whole thing so the hatchery can start producing spats on a commercial basis”.

Their success has been scrutinised by the experts, written about in scientific journals and accepted.

“We had the elements of success because we had a lot of wild brood stock and a healthy lagoon for oysters”.

The local team is making its new information widely available to overseas research institutions.

“Because by making it available, they

know which paths are more likely to lead to success,” Ben Ponia says.

The breakthrough by Ponia, Bertram, Samatua and research workers on Penrhyn, Rorangi Taime and John Naslun, puts the island on the world map.

It also now gives it the potential to become a leading producer of black pearls. ■