08/25/2026
Here’s a tiny research update on breeding for brightness. This is something we have studied using colorimetry analysis of our animal’s fleeces, which can produce a quantified description of brightness of individual fibers. This measure of brightness tells us more about how bright alpaca fiber will appear in a finished product than does the brightness of the intact fleece, where staple structure plays a pivotal role.
Our research results indicate that brightness is low to moderately heritable trait. Our in-herd analysis reveals a heritability of 0.18. This reflects a relatively small sample group (hundreds, not thousands of observations) from our herd alone but is similar what has been found in sheep. This means you can breed for it, but progress improving the trait in your herd will be slower on average than it will for more highly heritable traits like fineness. The good news behind that heritability result is that it implies that environment is playing an important role in the differences in brightness we see between fleeces, and this is something you can control through nutrition, housing conditions, and other husbandry choices that are quick and easy to implement compared to the slow generation by generation progress that happens through breeding.
That said, occasionally an animal will come along that can dramatically advance brightness in a herd. In the Snowmass herd this happened most recently with Snowmass Loro Piana, whose juvenile fleece is pictured here. Something about the particular combination of genes he inherited from his parents made his fleece exceptionally bright, even after adjusting for how white it was, and he passed this trait on so successfully that his descendants still make up the brightest animals in our herd, even several generations out.
We consider the brightness of alpaca fleece to be a very important trait because of how it helps differentiate products made from alpaca from those made from sheep’s wool. This is why we study it. Our next goal is to see if we can identify what is different about the hair structure of our brightness animals and then see if we can link it to genotypes.
