Molluscs in culture

Molluscs play a variety of roles in culture, including as food, as shell money, as dyestuffs, as musical instruments, for personal adornment with seashells, pearls, or mother-of-pearl, as items to be collected, as fictionalised sea monsters, and as raw materials for craft items such as Sailor's Valentines.

Seashells are admired and collected by conchologists and others for scientific purposes and for their decorative qualities.

Seashells have been used for personal adornment, such as the strings of cowries in the traditional dress of the Kikuyu people of Kenya, and the formal dress of the Pearly Kings and Queens of London.

Most molluscs with shells can produce pearls, but only the pearls of bivalves and some gastropods, whose shells are lined with nacre, are valuable. The best natural pearls are produced by marine pearl oysters, Pinctada margaritifera and Pinctada mertensi, which live in the tropical and subtropical waters of the Pacific Ocean. Natural pearls form when a small foreign object gets stuck between the mantle and shell.

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