#mushroom foraging

[victusinveritas]

For those not in the know, this is one of the Amanita mushrooms referred to as a Destroying Angel. Never, ever, ever, ever forage with an app. Especially for mushrooms.

[lake-lady]

Found the most massive morels of my life in my BACK YARD. I have spent hours on trails trying to find morels 1/8 the size of these 😂🍄

[melgillman]

Chanterelle season is here! Here’s the page I drew about them in my brand new mushroom hunting zine. You can read the whole comic for free or pay-what-you-want: https://ko-fi.com/s/6c16d1553e

Fungi Feast: A Mushroom Foraging Comic (PDF) - Mel Gillman's Ko-fi Shop

FUNGI FEAST is a 21 page full-color comic PDF all about mushroom foraging! The zine covers the identification and culinary uses of 13 commo

[rebeccathenaturalist]

So these were posted over on the MushroomID subreddit; the person holding them reportedly ate the mushroom in the bottom of the bunch raw, and intended to eat the rest, claiming all of them were the same species, "borellis" (maybe a mispronunciation of Boletus). Is he going to be okay?

Well....not entirely. While the unspotted mushroom looks like a nice, edible king bolete (Boletus edulis), the other three are Amanitas, likely either a yellow variant of fly agaric (Amanita muscaria), or Amanita chrysoblema (a synonym for A. muscaria var. guessowii). While these are not the sorts of Amanita that have amatoxins that will dissolve your liver, they contain muscimol and ibotenic acid (the latter of which both enhances absorption of muscimol and can also be converted to it.)

So he likely won't die, but he's potentially in for some unpleasant cycling between drowsiness and delirium/hallucinations, probably some ataxia and other neurological impacts on physical movement, and a lot of vomiting, especially as he ate the thing raw. There is always the chance of severe, life-threatening side effects such as cardiopulmonary arrest, but this is pretty rare.

Yes, there are people who deliberately take A. muscaria for its hallucinogenic and relaxing effects, and there's debate over whether you can effectively reduce the active ingredients through parboiling. Still, there are reasons my personal rule for eating mushrooms is that unless everyone agrees it's safe to eat, I'm not gonna try it. Given that I often find B. edulis in the same places and at the same time as A. muscaria, I'm just going to eat the boletes instead.

A cursory look at the mushrooms he had would have shown anyone with any actual foraging experience that they were two very different species. The hymenophores are different--gills versus pores--and the Amanitas have remnant veils (spots, potentially rings and cups) that the Boletus lacks. That's not even getting into things like taking a spore print (the Boletus should be olive green, while the Amanitas will be white.)

This, once again, is why my foraging classes focus so much on identification skills, and getting into specific traits to pay attention to, rather than just scrolling through a bunch of pictures of edible species. And it's why I dedicated an entire chapter of The Everyday Naturalist to these same traits and identification skills for fungi. I know it's a lot of information to keep in mind, but this isn't something where you want to take a short cut.

As always, you're welcome to contact me at rebeccathenaturalist(at)gmail(dot)com if you ever have questions or want my opinion on a mushroom you found.

[bruisedmooons]

In September

[wikipediapictures]

Ramaria araiospora

“A fruitbody of the coral fungus Ramaria araiospora Marr & D.E. Stuntz. Photographed in Jackson Demonstration State Forest, Mendocino Co., California, USA.” - via Wikimedia Commons

[axeandantler]

The wetland comes alive with fungus in the fall. Northern Maine