72 | New Scientist | 21/28 December 2019D
EEP in the forests of the north, a vicious
battle is raging. For generations, rival
families have fought to protect their
territory at all costs. Death and destruction are
widespread, sex is used ruthlessly for personal
gain and rumours abound about the fighters’
true lineage.
It is a little like something out of HBO’s
Game of Thrones, only even more gruesome.
While the winners in the fictional continent
of Westeros get to sit on the Iron Throne, in
the forests of France and Italy, the victors are
plucked, peeled and delicately grated over
home-made tagliatelle. Being a truffle, it
turns out, isn’t easy.
Truffles are best known for their distinctive
flavour and extravagant price, but there is
more to them than their gastronomic appeal.
Recent investigations have shown that their
underground existences are far more complex
than we ever imagined. “Truffle reproduction
is very bizarre,” says Marc-André Selosse at the
French National Museum of Natural History in
Paris. For one thing, we still don’t know exactly
how they pull it off. Truffles live in powerful
family clans that exclude their rivals, where
the mothers seem to hold all the power and
the fathers are nowhere to be found.
Working out why they live as they do won’t
just shed light on the subterranean life of
this valuable fungus, it could finally solve a
problem that has long eluded truffle-growers:
how to reliably produce a crop.
Like all fungi, truffles send spores out into
the world that grow to form a new generation
of organisms. The knobbly lump we eat is the
fruiting body – the part that produces the
spores. “They are like a black, crusty potato,
with black diamonds in the crust,” says ElisaThe secret life
of truff les
Powerful family clans. Mysterious sex lives. Constant warfare.
Alison George unearths the extraordinary hidden world of truffles
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