Reintroducing these animals can enrich barren soils and potentially reduce water contamination, a study shows

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Ecologist Anaïs Zimmer was walking in the Peruvian Andes one day, explaining to community members how hard it is for vegetation and soil to establish itself in deglacierized areas, or areas where glacier ice is retreating. That was when locals suggested an unconventional solution: bringing in llamas to fertilize the soil with their poop.

Zimmer, then at the University of Texas at Austin, had been studying the consequences of glacier loss in the Andes for the past decade. Peru, which is home to 70% of the world’s tropical glaciers, has lost more than half of them in the past 50 years because of climate change, according to the country’s ministry of agriculture. When the ice disappears, it uncovers metallic, rocky soil that had been covered for millennia. It can take hundreds of years for fertile soil to develop and vegetation to fully establish itself in the newly exposed, nutrient-poor grounds.

In the meantime, these bare swaths of land increase the risk of floods and landslides for downstream populations. In the Cordillera Blanca (Spanish for “white range”) of the Andes, the heavy metals present in the rocks also contaminate rivers and other water supplies.

But an ancient practice might offer a solution to these problems. The introduction of llamas, a camelid traditionally herded by native Inca populations, can speed up soil and vegetation development in areas of glacier retreat, suggests new research published in Scientific Reports.

“Raising llamas was an ancestral custom since prehistoric times,” said Jorge Mattel, a primary school teacher and president of the Llama 2000 Association, a group of Andean herders who raise llamas to recover their cultural identity and foster tourism in the mountains.

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