26 pearls found in Lebanese oyster

This 2014 video is called How Do Oysters Make Pearls?

From the Herald Sun in Australia:

One oyster yields 26 tiny pearls

From correspondents in Tyre, Lebanon

September 09, 2008 10:13pm

A LEBANESE woman working in a restaurant kitchen found 26 pearls in an oyster she was preparing for the table and will submit the find to the Guinness Book of Records.

Amal Salha, 50, said she was helping out her son in his Al Fanar restaurant on the waterfront in the southern port of Tyre, when she made the astonishing find yesterday evening.

“I couldn’t believe it,” she said.

“I was in the process of opening the shells when I found a number of shining pearls inside one of them,” she said. “I was so startled I screamed.

“It was so beautiful. It looked like a bunch of grapes.”

After counting them, there turned out to be 26 pearls of varying sizes. The oyster had been harvested off the Lebanese coast.

Pearl oysters are unrelated to the oysters normally eaten in Europe but Mrs Salha said they were still popular with the French and Italian soldiers serving with the UN peacekeeping force deployed in south Lebanon.

“We buy these oysters at $US10 ($12.26) dollars a kilo,” said Mrs Salha’s husband, Raymond.

“Generally we find one or two pearls but 26 is very rare.”