Andean vicuñas wear the world's dearest wild wool
Lama vicugna, the wild Andean camelid of high alpine slopes, is kin to the llama and likely ancestor of the alpaca. It yields tiny amounts of extremely fine fibre so costly because animals must be caught wild, shorn, and released. DNA work in 2001 tied alpacas more tightly to vicuñas than older guanaco stories allowed.
The vicuña is one of only two wild camelids left in South America, the other being the guanaco, ancestor of the llama. Llamas and alpacas were long thought to share that guanaco origin, but DNA work published in 2001 suggested the alpaca may descend from the vicuña instead. Slighter and more graceful than a guanaco, it stands 75 to 85 cm at the shoulder and weighs 35 to 65 kg, with a tawny back and a long white bib on throat and chest.
Today it lives only in the central Andes of Peru, Bolivia, northwestern Argentina and northern Chile, plus an introduced group in Ecuador, at 3,200 to 4,800 m. Days on the tough bunch-grass plains can be warm under thin air, but nights freeze, and the soft, dense coat holds layers of warm air against the body. Fossils once called Lama gracilis suggest the species ranged into lowland Patagonia, some 3,500 km farther south, until the early Holocene. Family bands of one male and 5 to 15 females hold territories of about 18 km².
That coat is the vicuña's fortune and its curse. Its fibres, about 12 micrometres across, are finer than cashmere at 14 to 19, and tiny scales on the hollow strands lock together to trap air. The Inca let only royalty wear it. After centuries of hunting, unrestricted until 1964, just 6,000 animals remained in the 1960s, and the species was declared endangered in 1974.
Rescue came through treaties. Bolivia and Peru signed a conservation convention in La Paz on 16 August 1969, followed by a management convention in Lima in 1979, and with CITES from 1975 these reversed the decline. Numbers have climbed to about 350,000, and wool trade reopened in 1993; animals are rounded up, shorn and freed, only once every three years. The IUCN moved the vicuña to least concern in 2018, yet an Argentine estimate in 2022 found Andean communities keep only about 3% of the fibre's value. It is Peru's national animal.
Source: Vicuña
