BROADCASTS.com

b'This week we have a mystery animal from South America, the hueque!\\n\\nFurther reading:\\n\\nLlamas are having a moment in the U.S., but they\'ve been icons in South America for millennia\\n\\nWhatever happened to the hueque? Seeking the lost llama of Chile\\nFirst complete mitochondrial genome data from ancient South American camelids \\u2013 The mystery of the chilihueques from Isla Mocha (Chile)\\nA dressed up person and her dressed up llama (picture from llama article linked above):\\n\\n\\n\\nThe noble guanaco:\\n\\n\\n\\nCuddly alpacas!\\n\\n\\n\\nThe noble vicu\\xf1a:\\n\\n\\n\\nA 1646 picture of a hueque:\\n\\n\\n\\nA 1776 engraving of four camelids of South America, including the hueque. The "guemul" in the upper left is actually a llama (the huemul is a type of deer found in a small part of southern Patagonia):\\n\\n\\n\\nA 1716 engraving supposedly depicting a hueque (central figure) alongside a llama (on the left with the carry-bags over its back):\\n\\n\\n\\nShow transcript:\\nWelcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I\\u2019m your host, Kate Shaw.\\nWe\\u2019ve done a lot of listener suggestions lately and I still have lots more, but this week let\\u2019s look at a mystery animal that I really want to learn more about. It\\u2019s a South American animal, specifically from central Chile, called the chilihueque or hueque.\\nWhether the heuque turns out to be an animal unknown to science or not, it\\u2019s definitely a camelid of some kind. Camelids include camels, llamas, and their relations, four of which are native to South America. Those four are the guanaco, the llama, the vicu\\xf1a, and the alpaca, which are all closely related.\\nThe vicu\\xf1a lives in high elevations in the Andes Mountains while the guanaco lives in lower elevations. The vicu\\xf1a is smaller and more delicate than the guanaco. It grows not quite three feet tall at the shoulder, or about 85 cm, with a long, slender neck and small head, and a short fuzzy tail. Its legs are long and slender too. It\\u2019s white and light brown with thick, incredibly soft fur that keeps it warm in its mountain home. It eats grass and other plants.\\nThe vicu\\xf1a lives in small groups, usually consisting of a male, several females, and their babies. When the babies are about a year old or a little older, males leave and initially form small bachelor groups while females leave and form small groups too, called sororities. Eventually both males and females of various bachelor groups and sororities will seek each other out during mating season.\\nVicu\\xf1a wool is extremely soft and fine, and in the days of the Inca Empire, around 500 to 600 years ago, only royalty were allowed to wear clothes made of it. It\\u2019s actually not wool like sheep wool but a fiber similar to cashmere from goats or angora from bunnies. Because the vicu\\xf1a is a wild animal, it has to be captured and its fur cut off, or shorn, but it\\u2019s hard to catch. Not only that, since the vicu\\xf1a is small, it doesn\\u2019t give very much fiber so you need to shear a whole lot of the animals to get enough to make a single piece of clothing.\\nIn the olden days, the Inca people constructed traps and worked together to herd vicu\\xf1a into the traps. Then they would shear the animals and release them again, but only once every four years. These days the practice has been re-instituted by the Peruvian government, although the capture and shearing is done every three years. The fiber is only supposed to be sold outside of Peru after it has been certified by the government as being gathered lawfully and humanely, and most of the money remains with the villagers who gather it. It\\u2019s extremely expensive to buy, but unfortunately that means that poachers will sometimes kill the animals to shear and sell the fiber illegally, even though it\\u2019s a protected species.\\nI don\\u2019t remember if I\\u2019ve ever mentioned this on the podcast, but one of my hobbies is spinning. I can take raw wool from a sheep or fiber from some other animal and turn it into yarn or thread using my spinning wheel or hand spindle, and yes,'