By Tobias Carroll Oysters are a big deal these days, and their profile is on the rise. As someone who’s fond of a tasty oyster or three, that’s an excellent piece of news. But there’s a subset of oysters whose meat is selling for stratospheric amounts — even though that species is known best for something else that they produce. Those would be pearl oysters, which are a distict species largely found in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. As the production of pearls became more of an industry, the meat of the oysters in question was initially considered to be a side effect of the process — not the p…