Pearls and mussels

djjo at Royal Ontario Museum today.

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Today Danny took me to the exhibition on pearls at ROM. I had hoped to see it, but given up, since it only runs until this weekend and I'm broke from Christmas. I learned more than I ever dreamed about these marvels of nature. I've never been a connoisseur of jewellery, but there's something mysterious and enchanting about a pearl.

Unlike the two recent special exhibits I toured at Art Gallery of Ontario, this one was exhaustive and exhausting. Too much information to absorb in one visit, too much standing in order to absorb it, too many nudging bodies to contend with. I generally don't mind crowds, but this one got to me. After a couple hours, my hips were aching.

I can see, after neglecting exercise for a few weeks or months, how much more quickly my body deteriorates than it did two or three years ago. I haven't accepted this aging thing as graciously as I intended. I hate the rising sense of fragility, the way pain becomes more pervasive and intolerable.

On the other hand it only demands a little vigilance and care. I know how much better I'll feel after a couple weeks of light weightlifting. I hope this soreness is my hips is just poor muscle tone, not the onset of arthritis that plagues my mother's family.

Anyway, I was talking about pearls. Beautiful little things that squishy aquatic organisms called mollusks form using biological processes, in response to an irritant. Not usually a grain of sand, as popular mythology suggests. More often, it's a food particle, such as the carcass of a tiny shrimp.

I never imagined the diversity of pearls. The familiar white ones typically come from the Atlantic pearl oyster, which was pushed to the brink of extinction by European greed. But a much wider array of colours—gold, silver, black, and many hues in between—comes from different species in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. (It struck me as ironic that the historic cradle of this industry, the coast of Ceylon and India's Tamil Nadu province, have been recently devastated.) Of course cultured pearls are nowadays much more affordable and widely available.

I was surprised to learn that the seeds used in pearl farming around the world are usually made from mother-of-pearl obtained from freshwater mussels in the Eastern United States. In fact the world's greatest diversity of freshwater mussels is found in this part of the continent. But of 300 indigenous species, 35 have already become extinct and about 75 more are threatened or endangered.

Near the end of the exhibit we actually had to pass through a couple sets of doors into another gallery. I was almost too sore and crowd-shocked to continue, but later I was glad we persisted.

Because the last stretch was devoted to a display on the freshwater mussels of Southwestern Ontario. It turns out this region was once a goldmine of species, and I knew nothing about it. But many originally found along the Grand and Thames River have already been extirpated. These waterways are still so polluted that efforts to repopulate them would be pointless. Arrival of the exotic zebra mussel has further besieged native species. However considerable effort is underway, with some success, in the Sydenham and Ausable rivers to preserve a handful of threatened species.

The discovery of this conservation endeavour happening under my nose, and of a diverse taxon I know little about, was for me the most interesting aspect of this glamorous museum tour. I also realized that the large "clams" I've picked up all my life at Poplar Bluff Beach on Lake Erie are in fact freshwater mussels.

One link for further exploration, when I have time: Saving Ontario's Mussels, from Environment Canada.

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Church of the Redeemer, Anglican, kitty-corner to the museum at Bloor Street and Avenue Road, a notable landmark I have never photographed before. Its sign bears a gay-friendly rainbow emblem.