Alpaca breeders have long noticed that as they breed for incremental fleece fineness in their animals, the standard deviation of diameter among those fibers also tends to decrease, the result of an apparent and generally favorable genetic link (or links) behind these economically important phenotypic traits. However, because the uniformity measurements they rely upon do not segregate it, they have generally paid less attention to directly managing the genetic sources of micron uniformity that are not linked to those that contribute to incremental fineness. This has been true even though those unrelated genetic sources of uniformity appear to be nearly as important to micron uniformity as those that also contribute to fineness.
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