The truffle-hunting dogs sniffing out new species in the name of science
The dogs are helping scientists discover rare new gourmet truffles—and monitor ecosystems.
With his tail whipping furiously, Massi, an Italian-bred 4-year-old Lagotto dog, runs around in a quiet forest in Hendersonville, North Carolina. The fur around his paws has gone dark and muddy from all the digging and darting across the forest floor; his curly muzzle brownish from rooting in the soil.
Massi rushes down the slope, leaps across a slow-running stream and disappears inside a thick bush. Rosie, his young offspring, follows. Massi pauses, narrows down on a spot, and starts digging. Luke Gilbert, Massi’s owner, joins him. “Bravo, Massi,” Gilbert says, lifting a dark brown truffle from the soil and announcing, “Another one!”
“Good job, Massi,” echoes Natalie Dechiara, Gilbert’s wife and the dogs’ in-house trainer. She is holding 6-month-old puppy Dolce, who watches his father and sister’s every move. In about 15 minutes, the dogs find four truffles—some small, others larger, rusty and rotten. Within days, fresh truffles like these will be sold at their farmer’s market pop-up shops or, based on demand, shipped to chefs and restaurants across the U.S.
Dechiara and Gilbert have their own online truffle-based business called Wild Goods, and they run truffle-hunting training classes and organize farmer’s market pop-ups across Asheville. But there’s plenty of science to dig up here, too. Like other citizen scientists immersed in the mushroom world, the couple collaborates with experts who identify new species, study regional biodiversity, map soil health, and identify conservation needs.
Indeed, across the U.S., more foragers are training dogs to hunt for truffles in orchards and in the wild. Truffle-hunting festivals encourage the public to join competitions, and dog-training businesses are drawing participants from around the country. Some people do it for gastronomy—truffles can perfume many dishes, from pasta to eggs—or as a side hustle, while others are intent on the citizen-science aspect.
In cooking, “truffle” usually refers to just a few prized Tuber species. Scientifically, though, the term covers the underground fruiting bodies of many fungi that form symbiotic relationships with plant roots and produce spores. Fungi are considered “bioindicators” because of their rapid response to environmental changes, air pollution, and soil alterations. That means identifying individual species is a first step toward fully documenting the impacts of stressors like climate change, urbanization, or drought on their ecosystems.
While there are few truffle scientists in the U.S., there are many amateur fungi enthusiasts who spend time in the forests helping with new discoveries. Such discoveries are critical because “you can't really figure out what is a rare species and if they are responding negatively to things humans are doing” if there’s no name for them, says Matthew Smith, a mycologist at the University of Florida. “It's kind of like the baseline that you need,” he adds.
A truffle hunting family
Dechiara was a trainer and Gilbert a student when they first met in a foraging training class. “I complimented Natalie on how she smelled and she asked to hunt some mushrooms with me,” Gilbert says. The friendship soon turned romantic. After reading a few articles about truffles in the Southeast and the growing use of dogs to hunt them, Dechiara proposed getting a truffle dog for her birthday.
In the summer of 2022, Eva arrived, a Lagotto Romagnolo dog from a Serbian breeder. Calm, caring and agile, she picked up the basics of truffle hunting fast. “It was really fun—just building friendship and finding activities to do together,” Dechiara says. Eva was a quick learner, discovering more than five different species of truffles, some well-known like Appalachian truffles, others rare and highly prized too, like Michigan truffle. Soon, they decided to get her a partner: Massi, another Lagotto from Italy. Together, Eva and Massi went on to have several puppies, including Dolce and Rosie.
But Eva’s journey ended in tragedy. Earlier this year, she died while attempting to give birth to another puppy, which died in utero.
“It was such a traumatic experience that left me depressed for almost two months,” Dechiara says. But, having to care for two more puppies and a whole business that revolves around foraging, the couple couldn’t stop. Their earlier success with Eva gave them hope to train the rest of their puppies.
People often use pigs, dogs, or rakes to hunt for the fragrant fungi, but uninformed or aggressive digging can damage the delicate mycelial networks beneath the soil. That’s why properly training a dog in this skill is so important ecologically.
To train, Dechiara holds a truffle in one hand and a piece of dried salmon in the other. Through repeated reinforcement, she teaches the dog to indicate the hand with the truffle. When the dog points to the correct hand, it earns a treat from the other. If it keeps choosing the wrong hand, there’s no reward. “It's very similar to how they train dogs to be drug-sniffing dogs at the airport,” Gilbert adds. Dechiara also hides cans filled with truffle flakes around the house and outside—some beneath trees, others around the garden, few along the roadside—so the dogs can track them.
At 1-and-a-half years old, Rosie seems visibly confident at tracking scent. Nose low to the ground, following the invisible scent marks, she stops right at the spot where Dechiara had hidden a container, and starts digging. The young Dolce also joins the party, his eagerness a clear sign of just how quickly Lagottos learn. Dechiara gives Rosie the code phrase—“show me!”—with an elevated pitch, so the dog points directly to the truffle scent and earns a treat.
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The dogs also respond to a few other code words. One phrase is “chercher La Chouffe,” where "chercher" means "seek" in French, and a La Chouffe is a type of beer. “When we are in the woods and if the dogs aren’t working, we can ask them [with the code] to hunt for us,” Gilbert says. He exclaims “all done!” when he wants them to stop working.
Gilbert says that he can tell if his dogs have found something based on their body movements. “The smell of a truffle travels more like a line of smoke. It doesn’t spread out the way light or sound does. When the dogs make a sharp 90-degree turn, that’s usually a sign they may have found something,” he adds.
One of Dechiara and Gilbert’s recent prized finds was a native and commercially rare truffle, Tuber Canaliculatum, also called Michigan (or Appalachian) Truffle, which Massi spotted on the way to their mailbox earlier this year. “We have heard people paying up to $3000 per pound for this,” Dechiara says. With its cinnamon-red skin and dark brownish and creamy white marbling, this truffle has been harvested by only a handful of people.
Another truffle that the couple hasn't yet identified smells faintly of banana cake. They plan to send it to researchers for DNA sequencing to determine the exact species.
Finding new truffles for science
Canine truffle-hunting efforts have already helped scientists uncover several new species just in the past year. Among them are new species of Tuber a classic gourmet truffle known for its sulfur-rich alcohol-flavored aromas that people associate with European cuisine, recently found across several Midwestern states.Other discoveries include Leucangium truffles related to morels known for their fruity and earthy aroma. Some of these species have now been spotted from New York to Massachusetts, well beyond their previously assumed range.
For foragers like Dechiara, the thrill of discovery itself is enough of a motivation. “Every time you find a truffle, it's almost like you hit the lottery!” she adds.
A growing interest in citizen truffle hunting has invigorated scientific research, helping identify new species and giving growers better tools for cultivation.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Benjamin Lemmond, now a mycologist at the University of California, Berkeley, found himself stuck at home without access to his lab or field sites. So he had to change his research plans. His supervisor dropped off a microscope and boxes of truffle specimens collected by foragers and amateur hunters. One specimen, long labeled under its European name Leucangium carthusianum, had been found in the Pacific Northwest. But an iNaturalist report from a collector highlighted the same species in New York, far outside its known range.
Lemmond borrowed that sample, sequenced it, and realized it wasn’t the European species at all. “We ended up describing it as a new species,” he says. Now, his team actively collaborates with foragers, including Gilbert and Dechiara, to identify more new species.
Once every couple of months, the couple also visits a truffle orchard at the Mountain Research Station in Waynesville, North Carolina. Since 2010, the station has been actively studying the cultivation potential of Black Perigord truffles, a highly-prized truffle native to Perigord region in France and factors influencing their harvesting.
Inga Meadows, plant pathologist at North Carolina State University, and her team at the station work closely with Gilbert and Dechiara, regularly checking in on the orchard’s truffle harvest with the help of their dogs. Meadows’ team inoculates young hazelnut, oak, and chestnut saplings with truffle fungal spores before planting them to enhance truffle production. Truffles are mycorrhizal, meaning the fungi must colonize the root tips of the host trees to proliferate.
The team has been testing orchard management practices like varying tree density and sunlight exposure, investigating different host species and looking at environmental factors influencing truffle production. Their aim is to ultimately provide science, evidence-based tips and advice to growers before they invest years in building an orchard.
More than 90 percent of the fungal diversity of the world remains unknown and truffles are among the least known of all because they are difficult to find. Yet, “owning a truffle dog is not like buying a microscope or a computer where you can just turn it off and leave it,” says Smith. He appreciates wild foragers who put immense effort in training dogs for finding new species of truffles. He emphasizes the need for better professional support and guidance for citizen scientists who are interested in dogs for truffle hunting.
Dechiara realizes the demand and challenge of the truffle-hunting enterprise. It is difficult training dogs, taking daily care of them, going out in difficult terrains, spending 40 to 60 hours a week foraging and sometimes even facing wild animals like bears. Still, the couple wants to keep truffle hunting in the wild and hope to have their own truffle orchard someday.
What began as a casual experiment with their first dog, Eva, has grown into a delicate intricate family bond that carries her legacy forward. “We want to keep [doing it] because Eva wouldn't have wanted us to stop truffle hunting!” Dechiara says.
