Recently, pearl aquaculture has been proposed as a coastal bioremediation technology (Gifford et al. 2004). This is because of the fact that pearl oysters have high filtration rates (Pouvreau et al.1999), concentrate pollutants within their tissue and shell (Al-Madfa et al.1998, Bou-Olayan et al. 1995), have a high protein content (Suzuki 1957, Numaguchi 1995), are found native in many areas of the world (Colgan & Ponder 2002) and the highly valued pearl product is not bound for human consumption. Because the mechanism of pearl production is similar to that of shell productionin the oyster, any effects observed on shell growth would likely be mirrored in pearl formation. Therefore, the inhibition of shell growth by high (270 g L−1) concentrations of lead in this study demonstrates that pearl aquaculture would be unlikely to succeed in areas suffering from high concentrations of dissolved lead. However, moderate concentrations (10–90 g L−1) of dissolved lead had the opposite effect, stimulating shell width growth.Furthermore, whereas high (270 g L−1) zinc concentrations did not significantly effect shell growth, a finding similar to Mai et al.(2003) who found that dietary zinc did not effect biomineralization in the abalone Haliotis discus hannai, they did reduce total oyster growth. Therefore, pearl aquaculture would unlikely succeed in areas with high dissolved zinc concentrations. The concentrations of aliphatic hydrocarbons used in this study did not negatively affect any of the measured oyster parameters, and in fact stimulated shell width growth at 30–270 ng L−1. Therefore careful evaluation of potential sites would be required to balance metal remediation requirements and pearl quality/oyster health outcomes.