Dog Hunting for Oregon’s Hidden Truffle Biodiversity with Brother Scientists

The wobble tail is a universal sign of a happy dog, especially for a rusty golden retriever named rye. It is his “teltail” signal where he found the treasure he was buried.

However, this treasure is not the pirate’s booty. Instead, it is a valuable fungus.

In the oak savannah just outside Eugene, Rai picked up with scent and dug up mountains of depilated leaves and grass frost. His feathers on the tail are his own proximity detector, allowing him to swing more quickly with confidence. But after cleaning up a few inches of dirt, he pleaded at Heather Dawson and looked up. Rye’s handler, Heather, kneeled down and continued to challenge. This bounty was an extraordinarily deep underground.

After another excavation, brown warty appeared together in the size of the nails. Rye looked up at Heather again, but this time he gave a shining example of “puppy’s eyes.” She brought the prize to her nose, but it smelled just covered in dirt. Nothing smells boring, but when it’s a roulette game between smearing lemon bars or getting rotten onions, it becomes a relief.

“The range of aromas I have to smell, sometimes I hate it. But I don’t know how he smells this,” said a doctoral student in biology at the University of Oregon’s University of Arts and Sciences. Heather said. A seemingly odorless discovery. “wonderful.”

Rye has discovered gene truffles, an infamous, mysterious underground mushroom, due to its small size and dirty colour. They are difficult to identify through traditional collection methods such as raking, but for animals with sharp noses, the scent of the truffles does not mark the location of the entire forest.

Scent detection dogs are widely used by the military to detect illegal substances, and some doctors sniff out the condition. So teaching your dog to find truffles for science is like with fringe use, Heather said.

But dogs can be trained to become truffle dogs, she said. Dogs are trained to find fungi of cooking and economic value, such as Oregon black and white truffles that are grate on pasta or infused into oil. However, the truffles used in the kitchen are part of what is beneath the surface.

Scientists don’t know how many fungal species exist in the Pacific Northwest, where they are, or which environmental factors they affect, Heather said. She said the biology and ecology of truffles in Oregon was largely limited to research conducted in the mid- to late 20th century.

“We don’t care for them the same way we care for plants and animals, so there’s a lack of data on fungi,” she said. “It’s pretty easy to investigate plants and animals and be listed as being threatened or at risk. But fungi, it’s difficult to study.”

Biodiversity cannot be sold, but it should be protected, Heather said. Heather Dawson and his sister Hillary Rose Dawson both trained rye training to help hunt a wide range of Good or Badsmel truffles for science and conservation.

While some truffles are respected for commanding their flavors and high prices from top restaurants and chefs, many other varieties have been found all over the world and play a role in a variety of ecosystems. Much of rye is not good to eat (at least for humans), but it’s still important.

Rai’s catalogue includes more than 50 genera or a wide range of categories of truffles since it began its search in 2020. The latest data from the sisters were published in a 2024 paper in Journal Ecology and Evolution, suggesting that several species of Oregon truffles could be affected. Increased temperature temperature and severity of wildfire season.

It’s a race against time to catalog those hidden treasures before they are lost to climate change.

“Truffle conveyor belt”

Heather has loved fungi since he was a child. Behind the childhood home in the Dawsons, Massachusetts, was a reserve forest where the sisters ran in the wild.

Hilary Rose, who earned her PhD in Biology from UO, said: “Yes, our personalities can clash. I’m loud and stubborn. She’s quiet and stubborn. But we’ve had 30 years of experience, how to solve it. I know 30 years to understand.”

However, the sisters who grew up homeschooled without formal science education did not expect to pursue a biology path later in life, especially since their parents were not scientists either. Until Heather trained her first truffle dog, Cricket, she saw the possibility of making her fungal affinity a real career.

Heather first trained cricket, cleaning up the truffles in the cooking by hiding truffle oil and frozen truffles inside and outside her house. Once it became natural, the blonde golden retrievers were particularly good at finding black truffles. But sometimes cricket will raise strange things, and that’s when Heather learns that there are hundreds of wild truffles in Oregon: the diversity of hidden fungi waiting to be understood.

When Heather got his rye it was natural to find the fungus underground. The sisters call him a truffle conveyor belt. Rye developed a truffle scent library ranging from honeygrass to burning brakes by rewarding with his favorite balls for a new and strange discovery.

“The dogs there recognize it as truffles, but my nose can smell the whole scented sweet,” Heather said. “That’s why dogs are good at finding things. They pull away all these different components. For rye, it’s probably a set of 10 different aromas, and maybe you’ll identify him as a truffle. But to me it smells like rank, old boots just smell.”

Oregon’s vulnerable gem

Rye was particularly skilled in finding Genea, a wide range of truffles, and truffles that smell sweet like white truffles and cheese and honey. At the same time, Hilary Rose developed the habit of taking field notes to map their research.

Using logs on truffle types, locations and weather, she realized that she could turn the journal into a dataset. A year after collecting data across the Willamette Valley, the sisters discovered that Genea is so common in western Oregon that it is normally common along with Douglas Fir Trees.

They also found that Genea rarely happens in the burning Douglas Fir Forest, including areas that experienced wildfires a decade ago. Dawson assumes that some species of genes may be vulnerable to fire. This is a potential problem that can be exacerbated by the threat of climate change.

That insight would not have been so easy to reveal in racking, a traditional trial and error method for excavating underground fungi.

“I think what’s unique about this dataset is that we can see both the presence and absence of rye,” said Hillary Rose. “We trust his nose and don’t think it’s there if rye can’t find it.”

However, their research, further supported by Heather’s ongoing doctoral research, showed that Genea is still fruitful in the recently burning Oak Savannah. Heather said the Oaks adapted to fire disorders through burning landscapes practiced by Indigenous peoples. Oak Savanna fires are cooler than coniferous fires, but how their fire management practices have affected the diversity of truffles in their habitat, especially as the truffles are growing at tree roots, so they fire. Who knows if it is adapted to.

With forests in the Pacific Northwest facing longer wildfire seasons, Heather investigates how arid conditions are changing the fungal ecology of the region and is there before it is lost. I plan to unearth something.

“If you get these extreme weather events, even being underground, I’m not going to isolate you from anything,” Heather said. “When you lose a tree, you lose the truffle bacteria that live in the roots.”

Twins 2 years apart

This is Dawsons’ first paper as a brother scientist, overcoming scientific skepticism about using truffle dogs to measure biodiversity. Although established in Europe, truffle hunting dogs are slowly recognized in America.

Heather said it was time sinks that train the dogs, and it took cricket to find her first wild truffles. Despite practice in their backyard, Cricket was unsure what to look for in the hundreds of new scented forests.

However, on one particular field trip, cricket had sniffed and paused there longer than she normally would. It all clicked for the dog when Heather helped polish the Duff and reveal the beautiful black truffles.

“Since then I’ve found something more important than I know that makes a difference, but how much I can beat the first feeling of knowing that my dog ​​can find truffles I don’t know,” Heather said. “I had a dream of the night of finding truffles because I had been spending so much time trying to get to that point, so it was really special.”

Heather will work with the truffle dog to catalogue the underground fungi from Oregon’s endangered Oak Savanna and Cascade Mountain. These include special highland habitats that are particularly vulnerable to climate change and extinction.

Hillary Rose recently moved to Australia, a global hotspot for truffle diversity, and is a postdoctoral researcher at the Australian National University. The tree terrain there isn’t as dog-friendly as the Pacific Northwest, she said. There she persuaded herself to buy a rake, and found three truffle species on her first go out.

“There’s nothing like going underground treasure hunting with your dog and sister,” said Hilary Rose. “You can’t really surpass that.”