  STAR has measured a variety of strange particle species in $p+p$ collisions
at $\sqrt{s}$=200 GeV. These high statistics data are ideal for comparing to
existing leading- and next-to-leading order perturbative QCD (pQCD) models.
Leading-order (LO) models such as PYTHIA need to be tuned to describe
identified strange particle data from STAR. We show that tuned PYTHIA can also
describe the pt-spectra of strange resonances. More rigorous Next-to-Leading
order pQCD calculations using parameterized fragmentation functions for quarks
and gluons will also be compared to STAR data. The OPAL experiment has recently
released $e^{+}e^{-}$ data from light quark flavor tagged analyses allowing for
the first time to make precise parameterizations of light flavor separated
fragmentation function. We show that our Lambda data put a more stringent
constraint on the gluon fragmentation function than $e^{+}e^{-}$ data.
Furthermore we show that pQCD fails to describe the observed enhancement of
baryon-to-meson ratio at intermediate pt (2-6 GeV/c), which may be a first
indication of other, non-perturbative mechanisms at play in $p+p$ collisions at
that momentum.
