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Mushroom ID
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this post was submitted on 24 May 2024
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Looking over the wikipedia page on this mushroom and all the similar, very edible ones...Yeah I'm never foraging mushrooms.
Yeah, I carefully read the description of its distinguishing features, studied the photo, and concluded I have no idea what I'm looking at and how to tell them apart.
I'm really good at spotting differences or inconsistencies, I'm totally lost with mushrooms though, and I go multiple times every Autumn with a woman in her 70's. She is very clear about what we are looking for. She throws out at least half of what I gather.
She does that cause she's jealous of how many you pick
Cool, I think you just saved me a bit of time.
Do these conditions have anything to do with a person's ability to identify mushrooms
Very likely. Experience is a thing
If she's that old and likes to forage there's only so many bad mushrooms you can eat
Also, women tend to have better natural color distinction, they more prominently have a genetic mutation that adds a 4th color cone.
Additionally men are significantly more likely to have some form of colorblindness.
Age also can have an effect on your perception of the world as well as the objective quality of your vision.
Finally, describing the subject of the sentence is normal.
I didn't know most of that, cool
Well, she's not dead yet so that's a good sign.
If someone goes mushroom gathering multiple times a year, getting to live until 70 speaks volumes about her ability.
Simple, just eat it and see.
If you're dead, it's poisonous.
If you are alive, you haven't eaten enough.
This.
I'll just trust the dealer.
Mushroom lesson I did says that looking under the cap, spore color, what tree root system it’s growing in, can give you a really solid ID
chanterelles are pretty safe to forage if they grow near you.
they are very distinct looking.
egg mushrooms 😋
They are so goddamned good, I highly recommend looking around white oak trees by carefully clearing away the leaf litter a few days after it rains. They can't really be bought in stores and when they do show up they're like $50 a pound because you can't really farm them as they have a symbiotic relationship with only certain trees and are very vulnerable to other fungus like mold.
Where I live (mountainous region in Austria) they are everywhere. I just go hiking for a bit so I'm at not too frequented spots and then I can just pick as many as I need, often the floor nearly is more yellow than brown on certain spots.
We don't have white oaks here but they typically grow in needle forests.
(And we call them Eierschwammerl = egg mushrooms, to explain my previous comment, I just think that sounds much nicer than chanterelles)
Image of a typical spot, took it a month ago ^
And this is why I grow my own. I'm very fond of Albino Texas PE6. Easy to grow, consistent, and you can clone and agar spawn over and over again. Such an aggressive little strain. And looks very distinct. Unmistakable.
There's nice little kits you can buy online for your kitchen. :)
Those don't have very good reputations among growers. Bunch of crap you don't need, and the stuff you do need is garbage quality.
Nah, but they're easy for laymen. If you've got links to affordable kits for beginners pls share.
Edit: How could I forget. One of my favourite physical food stands at a public market I used to go to sells kits online. They're good people.
https://www.smugtownmushrooms.com/growkits
In my experience, they are quite poor in producing anything worthwhile. Look up the Uncle Ben's Tek. 90 minute mycology or The Rookie Mycologist have great guides for this, and they're easy to follow. I've gotten amazing results so far.
Mushroom foraging can be safe, but the rules are:
Always learn from a local guide first. It's not transferable to other regions. Which makes books a bad way to do it, and the internet a horrible way.
You don't rule out dangerous mushrooms, you identify a specific edible mushroom.
Never trust a little white mushroom.
Is the main visual difference just the stem or whatever it's called being much longer?
IIRC, the only definitive way to ID mushrooms is by making a spore print - and even then you need to know what you're doing.
Just doesn't seem worth the risk to me.
nah it's generally fairly easy to ID mushrooms, the problem is just that if you miss a feature and mistake it for another, you'll fucking liquidize from the inside out.
This is the same reason that you never touch something that looks like a carrot plant in the wild, because it could be that one plant that kills you 3 times over.
I agree that it's generally not worth the risk though, hence why those who pick mushrooms (which is pretty standard to do here in the nordics) stick to like 5 species who have no dangerous lookalikes and actually taste good and are easy to find.
Here in sweden 90% of what people pick is chanterelles or boletes, whose entire families look effectively the same and at worst simply don't taste good. Boletes have ONE slightly toxic species in sweden, and it's bright red and only grows on one island in the baltic sea.
That's funny. I was just thinking to myself "Fuck all this mushroom noise. I'll just stick to eating carrots, no way to mistake those for something else." I guess I'll die quickly in the coming apocalypse.
This is why we befriend the people who can reliably ID plants and know what is safe to eat, you wouldn't survive an apocalypse alone regardless.
Mhm, society persists even through collapse scenarios mostly for exactly this reason. John the Butcher in 13th century Scotland might have lost his entire village to The Plague, but those guys in the village 3 miles down the road still have people who know how to forage, or hunt, or grow food, etc etc etc.
yeah do watch out for hemlock plants, they look very similar to wild carrots
Spotted water hemlock
"The confusion with parsnips can be fatal as C. maculata is extremely poisonous. It is considered to be North America's most toxic native plant."
"The chief poison is cicutoxin, an unsaturated aliphatic alcohol that is most concentrated in the roots. Upon human consumption, nausea, vomiting, and tremors occur within 30–60 minutes, followed by severe cramps, projectile vomiting, and convulsions."
It supposedly tastes good though.
If anyone is curious about the carrot mention, Google where the phrase "Sardonic Grin" came from.
Huh. I was thinking Aconitum species when they mentioned carrots.
Sardonic grin just mentions strychnine poisoning, which comes from a tree.
No, no. It's hemlock.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oenanthe_crocata
https://www.discovermagazine.com/health/plant-that-produced-ritual-death-smiles-mayve-given-homer-a-neat-phrase
Ah, yes. My mistake, did not read the entire wikipedia article there for sardonic grin.
It's all good. :) I try to hold back links sometimes to encourage people to go look up stuff, both because the curious will and they come back and contribute some new things. It's good for conversation. Mistakes are the best way to learn. People are neat.
Oh my, the mechanism of action on that is essentially the opposite of alchohol/benzos and would feel like going through the DTs. That's a very unfun way to go. Interestingly, a suggestive treatment would be benzos/getting blind drunk.
Okay so when you said "Never touch" I was thinking casually "Oh, don't go messing with it or munching on it or whatever. Sound advice."
Looking it up, oh...poison hemlock...you were being dead-exact.
Source
Oh holy crap. ~~Kill it with fire~~!
Not even fire can sate its lust for indiscriminate killing?!
Apparently it's a "recent problem" that this stuff is spreading all over the place.
It was as I suspected. Going outside is overrated. 😬
This is untrue. Spore print can be useful for some very similar species or when you are first learning but I’ve been picking and eating wild mushrooms for about 15 years now and I basically never do a spore print anymore. Once you learn it’s pretty unnecessary. The ones I pick are easy to ID anyway. Most people can learn to identify them fairly quickly with some instruction though I have noticed that some people lack the attention to detail to be good at it.
Yah -- and to add certain edible mushrooms or families of mushrooms are very distinctive (e.g. hedgehog fungi in the UK), and I would recommend novices start out with. Others I wouldn't touch with a barge pole even if I was relatively confident with an id, purely because it isn't worth the risk (e.g. miller Vs fools funnel).
Perhaps I should have said 'categorically' instead of 'definitively', but they are synonyms so...
I’m not sure I understand the distinction you are making here but I wouldn’t say it’s the only way to categorically identify mushrooms either. It is one tool among many, and one that is typically used with unfamiliar mushrooms, not those that a person is already familiar with.
Basically if you are not sure what you have it can help narrow down the possibilities. But typically if you are picking mushrooms to eat you are (or should be) already certain of what you have. I can’t think of a single scenario where spore prints would be the easiest way to distinguish similar edible and poisonous mushrooms. There are many other features that are more readily examined and spore prints are mainly for separating more distinct types of mushrooms from one another anyway.
I'm UK based so not hugely familiar with US mushrooms, but I seem to recall a spore print being useful for checking for false parasol? Though it's not the most obvious (e.g. snakeskin markings for distinguishing from parasol).
Btw I totally agree with your general point (I never use them, except to produce pretty spore prints for friends).
Lots of differences but the simplest one would be that button mushrooms would typically have color to their gills—depending on the species they usually start out pinkish or pale brown and move to dark brown as they get older. Destroying angel has pure white gills.
But button mushrooms are actually not very beginner friendly despite their familiarity since there are other poisonous lookalikes in many areas.
"Destroying Angel" is an incredibly metal name for a mushroom lmao.
My wife wanted to take a foraging class and I pointed out all the similarities and said to her, if you don't want to buy mushrooms from the store, we can just grow them.
The two mentioned species are pretty easy to distinguish once you get familiar with them (based on gills, spores and the stem base). But I would never rely on an app to make the decision for me! If you exclusively go for easier groups where there are no life threatening species in your area (boletes where I life), you should be pretty safe.