türkçe links to original Turkish article
(Hürriyet Newspaper, 15 February 2022)
Handle with extreme care.
In Mersin, police got a tip that "ambergris" had been brought into Turkey
illegally and was being marketed. A search was conducted in the car
and home of suspect F.A., with 42.750 kilograms of ambergris worth
10 million TL (about $750,000) found and seized. F.A. was taken into
custody but released by the public prosecutor.
Ambergris is used in different sectors and its production is very limited,
being created in the intestines of sperm whales to ease the passage of
sharp and hard objects through the whale's digestive tract. The whales
expel ambergris as feces or vomit. (!)
The fragrance (!) sector is the primary user of ambergris, which looks
hard, waxy and rocky to the eye. Its color may be black or grey.
Ambergris is flammable and very valuable.
Info from Wikipedia:
Ambergris is formed from a secretion of the bile duct in the intestines of the
sperm whale, and can be found floating on the sea or washed up on
coastlines. It is sometimes found in the abdomens of dead sperm whales.
Because the beaks of giant squids have been discovered within lumps of
ambergris, scientists have theorized that the substance is produced by the
whale's gastrointestinal tract to ease the passage of hard, sharp objects
that it may have eaten. Ambergris is passed like fecal matter. It is
speculated that an ambergris mass too large to be passed through the
intestines is expelled via the mouth, but this remains under debate.
Ambergris is only produced by sperm whales, and only by an estimated
one percent of them. Ambergris is rare; once expelled by a whale, it often
floats for years before making landfall. The slim chances of finding ambergris
and the legal ambiguity involved led perfume makers away from ambergris,
and led chemists on a quest to find viable alternatives
Jonah may have been the first human to discover
ambergris - the hard way.
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