![]() ![]() “It's rare,” he tells this reporter later, back home among the seal skulls, whale bones and taxidermied possums that clutter his living room. “That’s not ambergris.” (Esler makes a point of pronouncing it “amber-grizz,” explaining, in his affable New Zealand accent, that he is not French). Children trail in his wake, bringing him chunks of melted bottle glass and putrefying shark eggs and holding them up for his appraisal. With his towering frame, white beard and tree branch turned walking staff, Esler looks every bit like a sort of 21st century Gandalf. It is here that it finally comes into the hands of people like Lloyd Esler, a veteran ambergris forager, natural history teacher and collector of curios, who roams the beaches of New Zealand’s windswept southern coasts on a weekly basis, fossicking around among the pebbles and carrion for a piece of precious ambergris. It floats to the surface, brines in the salt water, hardens in the sun and is buffeted on the tides and oceanic currents for months, years, possibly decades, until it eventually washes up on some far-flung shore. This newly formed mass makes its way to the whale’s anus where, provided it doesn’t cause a fatal blockage, it is expelled. But scientists believe that, about one percent of the time, they make their way down into the whale’s digestive system, where they lacerate the sides of the intestines and are coated in a secreted, protective substance – not unlike that which coats tiny irritants inside oysters and turns them into valuable pearls. More often than not these indigestible squid beaks are spewed back out into the sea. Squids’ bodies are mainly soft, pliant and easily broken down, with one notable exception: their beaks, which resemble those of parrots and are harder than virtually all known metals and polymers. Deep in the abyssal darkness of the world’s oceans, some half-a-kilometre below the surface, sperm whales, the largest toothed predators on Earth, sustain themselves on a diet of squid – giant squid, colossal squid and Humboldt squid, among others. It’s hard to know for sure how ambergris is formed, but the dominant theory is this. ![]() And to the right buyer – namely, someone who knows the right people in the luxury perfume industry – they’re worth a small fortune. In reality, the precious stones are a digestive byproduct of one of the largest animals on Earth. These days beachgoers most often mistake them for hunks of fat or pumice, fetched up on the shore among the flyblown miscellany of flotsam, jetsam and seawrack. ![]() One of the world’s most mysterious substances, these hardened little lumps of bodily fluid have been misidentified over the centuries as everything from meteorites to mushrooms, dragon spit to fish liver. ![]()
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