I hope these findings make truffle cultivation easier. I’ve eaten truffles mixed into other food, such as cheese, but I’ve never eaten one by itself. Would like to…

“The mystery of truffle reproductive habits has helped keep the culinary delicacy relatively difficult to farm, but researchers have steadily been working to understand the sex lives of truffles so that farmers can more reliably grow them.

Other fungi, like mushroom, reproduce asexually by spreading their spores through the air.

For years researchers thought truffles reproduced in a similar fashion, by spreading their spores not through the air but through the feces of the dogs or pigs that would dig them out of the ground.

In 2008, Frencesco Paolocci, a researcher from the Institute of Biosciences and Bioresources in Perugia, Italy discovered the common wisdom was wrong and truffles are very much sexual entities.

According to a report in New Scientist, Paolocci discovered that truffles were also split into male and female forms, and could only reproduce when a member of each sex partnered.

A female partner would deliver nutrients to the new tissue and a male partner to deliver DNA.

Within each sex are a further two distinct mating types, named MAT 1 and MAT 2, which need to be paired before reproduction can begin.

Unfortunately, different truffle types are more likely to kill each other than to reproduce when put in close proximity with one another…”

https://mol.im/a/7841351

Trees also communicate and feed each other through the fungi growing in their rood systems.

I rather like truffles. If this research allows for them to be less expensive, I would be very pleased... and use them a lot more.

BTW – in France, at least, pigs with a superior sense of smell are used to find the truffles, which grow underground. I’ve wondered why dogs weren’t used instead. I think dogs have the best sense of smell of all animals, and I suspect that they’re easier to train than pigs. And it looks as though my thoughts were correct. A little web searching found this article:

https://modernfarmer.com/2013/...uffle-smelling-dogs/

However, the article states, A bit into it, that pigs don’t need training to find truffles, contradicting an earlier statement.

Thinking the best nose award goes to the elephant. Now when logistics come in to play...