What is Skin Imprint®?
As an alternative to skin biopsy, Skin Imprint provides details regarding an alpaca’s fleece quality while being non-invasive.
What do we measure?
Skin imprint measures the most challenging traits to quantify in alpacas namely density and uniformity of micron, especially when referring to primary fibres.
Folicular density
With Skin Imprint, you can easily see how your alpacas rank in density as our test provides both a FD (follicular density) score to show how many fibres there are per square millimeter and a S:P ratio to indicate how many secondary fibres there are per every one primary fibre.
The higher these numbers are, the denser the animal is.
Uniformity
There are many indicators to uniformity of micron that are commonly used in the fibre industry such as noting the SD (standard deviation) in the micron of a fleece, noting the quantity of fibres there are over 30 micron and examining the CEM (coarse edge micron), which is an indicator the micron difference between the average and the finest extremity of the coarsest 5% or fibres.
The Skin Imprint test provides results for SD and quantity of fibres both over 30 and over 40 micron in the sample but it does not provide a CEM score. Instead, because we can distinguish the primary from the secondary fibres, our test provides a P-S difference to reveal and quantify increase in micron is between the primary and secondary fibres.
A larger P-S score would indicate a greater rise in micron between the secondary and the primary fibres, and thus a coarser primary fibre, whilst a lower score would indicate the difference between the two is smaller, meaning the fleece is more uniform in micron.
This information will be invaluable for breeders in wishing to improve their herd’s density, achieve better uniformity of micron, and push the boundaries of quality.
