Researchers examining the carcass of a stranded sperm whale have made a miraculous find in the cetacean’s gut. They found about 9 kilos of ambergris, which is worth about 500,000 euros.
The sperm whale recently washed up dead on La Palma, one of the Canary Islands. Researchers at the University of Las Palmas suspected that the sperm whale had died from digestive problems. They therefore started their research in the intestines of the mammal.
“What I found there was a stone with a diameter of 50 to 60 centimeters and it weighed more than 9 kilograms,” said lead researcher Antonio Fernández Rodríguez to the British newspaper. The Guardian.
Not much later that stone turned out not to be a stone, but ambergris. Ambergris is a smelly, but valuable substance that is only produced in one in a hundred sperm whales.
Ambergris is mainly used in the perfume industry, because it contains a substance that makes the scent of perfume last longer. It is therefore of great value. Ambergris is therefore nicknamed ‘floating gold’, because the valuable substance is often found at sea.
2023-07-05 19:57:27
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