Daniel Newberry's excellent article in the May 2013 Jefferson Monthly (The Members' Magazine of The Jefferson Public Radio Listeners Guild) entitled "Biodiversity on the Frontier" offered information on truffle discoveries in one of the world's most biodiverse areas: the Klamath-Siskiyou region.
Scott Loring, an Ashland-based botany consultant, recently discovered a new genus of truffle and assisted a colleague in the identification of a second previously unknown truffle. Both findings are expected to be published this spring. At its most basic level, a truffle is an underground mushroom, with spores dispersed by the animals that eat them and disturb the soil, unlike the windblown spores of mushrooms. Fungi, says Loring, are on the cutting edge of biodiversity. "With truffles it's a relatively easy thing to find new species because nobody ever sees these things, they're all underground, so you actually have to get out and look for them, rake the ground." You'll know a truffle, he adds, because they look "A bit like little potatoes, that at first look like a rock or a clump of dirt, and come in a whole rainbow of colors."
Truffles come in
a variety of sizes and shapes.
Loring was looking for something completely different south of Cave Junction when his rake turned up an odd yellow truffle. Inside, he found olive gel-filled chambers. He knew he had discovered something unusual because this specimen also "Has the spores of one genus (Rhizopogon) and the flesh of another genus (Hysterangium)." He has not settled on a name of this new genus, but doubts he'll name it after himself. "If it gets named after me, I won't be the one to write it up and publish it, that's one of the rules involved in naming things."
The other new truffle species was more difficult to identify. Loring and his colleague, Mike Castellano, a researcher with the US Forest Service in Corvallis, found that the new truffle's physical characteristics - such as a fuzzy exterior in this case - was not enough to identify it, so they applied a chemical stain, Melders, to the sample. A fungi tissue typically retains this stain with a specific color, and the result of this test is often diagnostic in narrowing the identification of the species. In this case, however, the stain slowly disappeared, it was evanescent, an unusual and odd reaction. For this reason, they tentatively named their find, Rhizopogon evanescent.
The Klamath-Siskiyou region has been designated an Area of Botanical Significance by the International Union of Conservation of Nature and has been nominated as a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve. We don't think that it is unlikely that additional and previously unknown truffles will eventually join these two newly discovered truffles and be added to the nearly 3,500 species that have already been catalogued in the region.