About Suris
What is a suri?
The suri is a rare type of Alpaca making up only 3% of alpacas in the world. The main difference between huacaya (more common) and suri is the fleece. Unlike the fluffy huacaya the suri fleece hangs in defined pencil thin locks often called "curtains of silk". The locks part along the backbone and can hang to the ground it the alpaca is not shorn.
Suri Fleece
Suri fleece is renowned for its lustre and lovely soft silky feel. There is less modulation in the fleece and everything excluding only legs can go it the same lot at shearing. This increases the amount of high value fleece on a suri.
World wide the scarcity Suri fleece creates a high demand from processors creating beautiful garments with drape and lustre with a fine soft feel such as suits, capes and coats. These command very high prices.
Suri Genetics
There are different theories around about what a suri is exactly. The most popular being Ponzonie single gene theory. This sets out that the suri is the dominant gene "S" with the huacaya being a recessive gene "s". A homozygous suri would carry two suri genes "SS" but an alpaca could look like a suri (Phenotype suri) but have a huacaya gene "Ss" making it a heterozygous suri. Therefore when a Homozygous suri is crossed with a huacaya the offspring would always be a suri, a huacaya and huacaya would always produce a huacaya. And a Heterozygous suri and huacaya would produce 50% suri 50% huacaya. At Surico we have seen this theory prove true.
Homozygous Suri "SS" with Huacaya "ss":
= 100% heterozygous suri offspring.
Heterozygous Suri "Ss" with huacaya "ss"
= 50% Heterozygous suri, 50% Huacaya offspring.
Heterozygous suri "Ss" with Heterozygous suri "Ss"
= 25% Homozygous suri offspring, 50% Heterozygous suri offspring, 25% Huacaya offspring.
Why Cross Suri and Huacaya?
First cross suri also known as an F1 suri is from one suri parent (usually the male) and one huacaya parent. According to Ponzonies theory we know these are Heterozygous suri's so why would we do this. Surely it is better to breed homozygous suris so we know we will always get a suri?
Firstly suri's are rare and therefore very expensive to purchase. One way of quickly boosting the numbers of suris available is to take advantage of the suri dominance and cross them with Huacaya. We can then put these F1 suri's back to a suri male and very quickly increase the size of the suri population.
It is also a good way to increase the number of coloured suri.
Is there anything wrong with a first cross or F1?
As far as fleece goes no! There are many cases of first cross suri winning a show. Like all breeding it totally depends on the quality of the alpacas, suri or huacaya, male and female used in breeding.
The main problem with a first cross is that you know it is a heterozygous suri and it may have a huacaya offspring unless mated to a homozygous male. While suri's are rare, homozygous males are very rare in NZ. Also ask if you are sacrificing quality of fleece for surety of suri offspring. A suri stud may have 100% suri offspring but are they any good?
Suris at Surico
At Surico our long term goal is to breed a line of fine white suri. Just because we are breeding whites doesn't mean we don't see the value in coloured. We have many coloured suri on the farm many of which are for sale including several black suri's which are mated to some of the best black suri studs. See our suris for sale.
We ended up with a white suri goal after a fairly long winding path. Starting out with a herd of 15 oldish chilian girls we reached the realisation that we had to do something drastic to improve our herd. One choice was get a good quality Peruvian male and try to catch up to the other breeders who had a jump on us or get a suri male and cross over to a coloured suri herd.
A visit to Australian and some serious suri breeders over there convinced us that suri was the way to go. Not only do you fall in love with the feel of the suri fleece the elegant look of the suri soon became preferable over the fluffy huacaya. Once we researched some of the facts about suri it was an easy decision to make. A small industry, just starting out, easy to get in at beginning and be a leader in the industry. All of these things are still true when breeding suri.
Our first option to go for coloured was purely based on the fact we had a base herd of coloured chillian huacaya. So our first step was to import a coloured suri male and three females. Our first three female were brown, black and dark brown and two more bought shortly afterwards were dark fawn and black. Looking back we see how lucky we were getting these black animals and allowing us to start a small black herd. It is only recently we have managed to mate them to a black male as there were none in the country.
After more visits to Australia and a little more experience with suri's we decided the coloured animals didn't have the quality of fleece we wanted in our suri herd. This bought about our latest step of importing white suris from Australia and buying a share in a while male from peru. We will continue to breed our white herd while at the same time use of quality white suris to increase the lock structure and lustre of our coloured suris.
At Surico we are offering to share our experience and knowledge of breeding suri with you. We are only too happy to talk and share with others wanting to start breeding suri.
Suris at Surico 2006
Since beginning our suri journey we have made major inroads to our breeding program, becoming a leader in breeding suri in NZ as proved by our recent show record. Our turning point came in 2004 while organizing the Alpaca Assn NZ Conference. Brooke was privileged to have a conversation with Mike Safley, the keynote speaker from USA. Mike had spotted our wonderful Accoyo suri male, Kaihere Accoyo Brilliante, on the skyline and asked about him. He also asked about our breeding plan, at that stage we were thinking about getting outside services for some of our best females. Mike Safley said “why would you do that when you have an Accoyo male like that [and 3 others]. Don Julio Berreda has spent 60 years breeding them, why would you go anywhere else?” We realised that this made sense we had the best genetics in the world at our finger tips with four Accoyo Suri Males from Don Julio’s plantel herd and a large number of females originally imported from Allianza in Peru. These were the building blocks for a highly successful breeding program. We decided to close our herd and only use the male Accoyo bloodlines to cover our females, with excellent results, we have no regrets.
Our breeding program is on track and with a large ratio of female offspring having been born, it has allowed us to progress rapidly.
To date Surico Yulia has been our stand out result, a second generation Accoyo, she is ready to be mated to another of the Accoyo Males in our stable.
However she is not the only one, with 4 out 6 Championships at the National Show in 2005 the progeny of all four Accoyo boys have been stamping their mark in the New Zealand suri industry with dense, lustrous fleeces, good bone and conformation.
Breeding Suri for Colour
Although we specialize in breeding top quality white suri alpacas, we also have a special interest in breeding the elusive coloured suri. Most coloured suri a huacaya in their background somewhere as proved by the very small number of proven homozygous coloured suri males. At Suri we are experimenting with breeding coloured suri to try and maintain the colour genes and improve the quality by using the top white males. We also have a group of coloured suri and huacaya we use for testing new males for suri homozygosity and colour.
