French Polynesia exports more than 90 per cent of its pearl production, making it the world’s largest exporter of Tahitian black pearls. Tahitian black pearl exports are therefore crucial for the Tahitian economy as they accounted for an average of 50 per cent of total export earnings, for the latest data available, for the years 2004, 2005, and 2006. This means that export performance not only...

Oceanic islands frequently support endemic faunal radiations that are highly vulnerable to introduced predators [1]. This vulnerability is epitomized by the rapid extinction in the wild of all but five of 61 described Society Islands partulid tree snails [2], following the deliberate introduction of an alien biological control agent: the carnivorous snail Euglandina rosea[3]. Tahiti's tree snai...

The Rare Earth Elements (REEs) have been widely used to investigate marine biogeochemical processes as well as the sources and mixing of water masses. However, there are still important uncertainties about the global aqueous REE cycle with respect to the contributions of highly reactive basaltic minerals originating from volcanic islands and the role of Submarine Groundwater Discharge (SGD). He...

Because of sexual propagation of Mexican lime in southern regions of Iran, there are many lime accessions (lime biotypes) in Mexican lime gardens in which appear some variation in fruit and tree shape. However, most of these accessions are susceptible to witches broom disease of lime (WBDL). Persian lime (C. latifolia Tanaka) is a triploid WBDL-tolerant species. Considerable number of un-descri...

Vanilla is a flavoring recovered from the cured beans of the orchid genus Vanilla. Vanilla ×tahitensis is traditionally cultivated on the islands of French Polynesia, where vanilla vines were first introduced during the nineteenth century and, since the 1960s, have been introduced to other Pacific countries such as Papua New Guinea (PNG), cultivated and sold as "Tahitian vanilla," although both...