Pennsylvania man has purple pearl as an appetizer at Delaware restaurant

A Pennsylvania man on vacation in Delaware found a surprise in his clam appetizer: a purple pearl.

Scott Overland was dining in Rehoboth Beach when he bit down on something hard in a $14 clam appetizer.

“This was actually most of the way through the bowl of clams and I felt just something hard as I ate one of them, and at first I thought it was a shell or something like that and then when I looked at it it was purple, so that was kind of unusual,” Mr. Overland told Delmarva Peninsula NBC affiliate WRDE-TV.

It was not a shell fragment, however, but a purple pearl. Although pearls are associated mainly with oysters, they are capable of forming in other mollusks like clams.

“We had never heard of a pearl in a clam. I always thought they came in oysters,” Mr. Overland told USA Today.

Although pearls are associated with the hue, pearlescent, that bears their name, chemical changes in the water that filters through the mollusk can alter the color of a resulting pearl.

“So depending on the … the chemistry of the water the pearl could come out in different colors,” jeweler Paul Cheng explained to WRDE-TV.

The pearl is more than a source of toothache.

“You can definitely get it graded, and they are worth money,” Ballard Clam and Oysters spokesman Tim Parsons said to USA Today.