Yemeni fishermen found and sold a 280-pound (127 kilograms) chunk of whale vomit for a whopping price of $1.5 million.
Some dream of digging gold while others hope to find whale vomit. In Yemen, 35 fishermen recovered a 280-pound chunk of whale vomit from a sperm whale carcass and sold it for the aforementioned price.
The 35 fishermen followed their noses to a whale corpse in the Gulf of Aden and discovered to their pleasure that it contained the rare substance ambergris.
One of the fishermen, whose share of the profits helped lift him and the others out of poverty said: “It’s like an unbelievable dream,”
He and his crew came across the remains of a sperm whale while fishing in the Gulf of Aden. They followed a tip from another fisherman about a whale floating nearby.
“As soon as we got close, there was this strong smell,” one of the men told the BBC. “And we had a feeling that this whale had something.”
The carcass of the whale contained hundreds of pounds of ambergris — a pungent, waxy substance found in the intestines of sperm whales.
“We decided to hook the whale in, take it to shore and cut into it to see what was inside its belly,” explained one of the men. “And yes, it was ambergris. The smell wasn’t very nice but lots of money.”
The fisherman sold their find to a buyer in the United Arab Emirates for a whopping $1.5 million.
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