Coral jewelry and statues | Torre del Greco, NA

Mediterrean and Pacific Coral: the differences

30-05-2022
Mediterrean and Pacific Coral: the differences

We have already written about the various kinds of coral on our blog (https://www.aucella.com/blog/different-colors-of-coral), but there are various questions and requests that come to us about difference between Mediterranean coral and Pacific coral. These two types of coral resemble each other in the shades of color, but the main differences concern their origin, the fishing method and the use in processing.

Mediterrean coral

The red Mediterranean coral is the best known in Italy and worked in Torre del Greco. The entire Mediterranean basin is very rich in red coral, whose scientific name is Corallium Rubrum. It is fished along all the coasts of the Mediterranean: in Spain, France, Greece, Algeria, Tunisia, Croatia and Morocco.

Pacific coral is fished between the coasts of China and Japan, as far as Taiwan.

The red coral of the Mediterranean is collected between fifty and one hundred meters and has a smaller structure. It is not fished, but "harvested", thanks to the policies related to environmental sustainability, strongly promoted over the years by the trade association Assocoral. Thanks to our commitment as an association, today the Mediterranean coral enjoys excellent health and the species is preserved with a selective collection carried out exclusively by professional divers, obliged to respect precise rules regarding the quantity and size of the coral and the collection period.

Pacific coral

The collection and sales of Pacific coral are regulated by the CITES international convention (https://cites.org/eng). A series of documents bind any activity in the sector. The Pacific coral is a coral that lives at greater depths and fishing takes place with mechanized systems such as ROVs or small equipped submarines. Some corals are found at a depth of more than five or six hundred meters, unreachable by man. The structure of the Pacific coral lends itself to different types of processing, such as the engraving of statues, a process not suitable for Mediterranean coral because of its smaller structure.

Distinguish Mediterranean and Pacific coral

The "white spot" is the main distinguishing feature. The Pacific coral has a white internal exoskeleton, which starts from the base attached to the rock up to the tip of each branch. Pacific coral artifacts will exhibit this white spot in any case. In the case of worked coral, care must be taken in evaluating the presence of the white spot, because we often try to hide it by making a hole in the vicinity of the spot to produce barrels, spheres or other. Just look between one dot and another to try to understand what coral it is. In the case of statues, the stain will usually be found on the back, as well as in the cabochones (https://www.aucella.com/catalogue/coral/cabochons) at the bottom.