CHINCOTEAGUE, Va. (Delmarva Now) -- A Pennsylvania family who has been visiting Chincoteague for more than 40 years got a big surprise Thursday during dinner when a family member found a pearl inside a littleneck clam.
Laurie Boyles' son, Dillon Henderson, bit into one of 200 clams they had purchased from Tom's Cove Aquafarms on Chincoteague — "almost breaking a tooth," said Boyles.
"He was going to throw it away because he thought it was a rock," she said, adding, "Me and my mother stopped him and started looking at it and realized that it was a pearl."
"It is absolutely gorgeous," Boyles said about the lavender-hued gem.
Boyles' mother, who owns a home on Chincoteague and is here for the summer, plans to get the pearl appraised.
With news of the rare find, shellfish lovers attending this year's seafood festival on Chincoteague likely will take a closer look at the thousands of clams and oysters they enjoy at the event.
Tom's Cove Aquafarms will be supplying 58,000 littleneck clams, along with 3,000 half-shell clam and oysters, for the upcoming 50th Annual Chincoteague Seafood Festival on May 5 at Tom's Cove Park Campground.
Tom's Cove Aquafarms has been raising hard clams since 1994 in a natural cove that receives a twice-daily tide flow from the Atlantic Ocean.
Tommy Clark, owner of Tom's Cove Aquafarms, said of pearls being found in clams, "They're not unheard of, but they're not common, either."
He has heard of only a few in his many years in the seafood business.
Most clam pearls have a purplish tint, as does the pearl Henderson found, Clark said.
"That's all 100 percent natural pearl — that's Mother Nature," he said.
Pearls are found more commonly in older, wild-harvested clams than in aquaculture-raised clams, which typically are harvested at only two to three years old, Clark said.
Boyles, from State College, Pennsylvania, has been visiting Chincoteague since she was three years old. She said the family has eaten plenty of shellfish, but has never before found a pearl.
After the find, "we started doing some research, to find out that clam pearls are fairly rare," she said, adding, "We were pretty excited about it."
While pearls are more commonly thought of as growing inside oysters, they also can grow in clams. "All shelled mollusks have the possibility of producing pearls, but they are not all created equal..... many do not have the qualities of a true gem," according to www.pearldistributors.com.
Henderson's find is not the first time in recent memory someone dining on clams on the Eastern Shore of Virginia has come upon a beautiful pearl.
A Virginia Beach woman, Kathleen Morelli, in 2014 found a rare, 4 1/2-carat, lavender pearl in a littleneck clam purchased at the Great Machipongo Clam Shack in Nassawadox.
That clam, grown in Hog Island Bay, likely was between 1 1/2 and 2 years old and came from B&E Seafood in Willis Wharf, about an hour south of Chincoteague on the Eastern Shore of Virginia.
Billy Bowen of B&E Seafood in Willis Wharf, who has been in the clam-growing business for a quarter century, said he had never found a pearl in a clam grown through aquaculture like the one Morelli bit into.
"In the natural clams you could find them in there, about once a month you could find them. But in all my experience, I have never seen one to come out of an aquaculture clam – it's very rare," Bowen said.
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