During the summer an oyster lays about 500 million eggs in the water to be fertilized by the male's sperm. Soon after that a pinhead sized larva swim around and hatch in about ten hours. In two days shells begin to form and two weeks later pea sized "spat" sink to the bottom. Living on its hollowed out shell the oyster grows one inch a year. Adults can live to be ten years old and reproduce billions of times. With so many predators of the oyster, only about one in a million spat will survive.

Enemies: Starfish, oyster drills, oystercatchers and drum.

The odds of finding a pearl in an oyster are 1 in 12,000