Welcome to Light Heart Ranch Alpacas !`
What is an Alpaca; What is their Value?
What is this creature that we call Alpaca and where did it come from? The answer to this question is pieced together from many sources as no actual written record exists. Our answer is intelligent conjecture based on these sources.
These amazing creatures known as “Alpaca” are descendants of the wild Vicuna’s of the Andean Altiplano. The proof of this hypothesis can be found in strikingly similar dental characteristics. The larger cousin, the “Llama” was most likely domesticated from the “guanaco”. Archeological digs indicate that the domestication of the wild South American Alpaca began approximately 7,000 years ago by the Pukara Indians in the Lake Titicaca region of Southern Peru.
Following the fall of the Incan empire and the dispersal of the alpaca to the mountainous terrain, not much is known or written until the 1800s when shippers of wool from the sheep of South America started using “Llama” (llama & alpaca) fiber as ballast to fill the holds of their ships. When the ships arrived in England the ballast fiber was usually discarded.
There are two basic types of alpacas – the Huacaya and the Suri.
Basically the only difference between the two types is their fiber.
The Huacaya is called the Wooly alpaca because the fiber grows at a ninety degree angle to the skin creating a very fuzzy, teddy bear appearance. The Suri or silky alpaca has fiber that grows at forty five degrees to the skin and therefore falls in ringlets or locks creating a draping curtain of reflecting light. The fiber is hollow which creates the excellent thermal properties of all alpaca fiber. The outer cover of the fiber is similar to human hair in that it has overlapping scales.
While Huacaya fleece can be incredibly soft with micron counts ranging from 14 micron to 20 micron in high quality animals, fewer scales of longer length on Suri fiber make the fiber incredibly soft and silky to the touch even with a slightly higher micron.
Today, the most sizable populations of alpacas outside of South America are in Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the United States, all of which were established in only the last few decades. Peru produces an average of about 3.5 million kilograms of fiber annually, which represents 90% of the total world production.
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