  Via the study of strange particle production within the STAR experiment, we
try to address the surprising amount of baryon transport at the Relativistic
Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC). We report here preliminary results showing that, at
mid-rapidity and for the top energy of RHIC, the number of created baryons
exceeds the number transported from the colliding nuclei. However, thanks to
the large acceptance of the experimental setup, one could expect to observe the
transition between the ``soft'' regime (low transverse momentum -$\pt$- region
corresponding to a bulk of hot and dense matter hadronizing) and the
perturbative one (higher $\pt$ region) where the fragmentation of incoming
partons is supposed to dominate hadron production.}
