Mushroom ID

[Fungus]

1. Good advice, but to be fair, no one suggested they would be OK to eat.

2. I used to try to use a minimum of 3 books (including Philips) to ID anything I was considering eating. Now I just stick to Cauliflower Fungus, Chanterelles, and the odd Amethyst Deceiver, as I'm usually confident in my own ID skillz with these.

 

1. Tony did, by asking whether it turned yellow when bruised and smelled of aniseed, which are characteristics of the edible Agaricus arvensis, A. silvicola and A. essettii (= A. abruptibulbus). So what would have happened, if one would have eaten A. xanthoderma because the faint smell of rubber was mistaken for the (faint) smell of aniseed ?

Last year a Dutchman, and the year before a Dutch woman died after eating field "champignons", that turned out to be whitish Amanita phalloides growing in meadows surrounded by oaks, from which roots the mycelium fruited.

And in Sweden, every year people die because they mistake Amanita virosa for Cortinarius (= Rozites) caperatus.

2. Do you know how many people became seriously ill after they mixed up Laccaria amethystina with Mycena pura or Inocybe geophylla var. lilacea ? And what to think of mushroom guides listing the potentially deadly poisonous Paxillus involutus or "Russian Roulette Fungus" and Tricholoma equestre (rhabdomyolisis) as edible ?

Edited September 26, 2011 by Fungus

[RobArb]

I heard about a so called expert going in a foray with a fe friends and tasting some mushrooms, I'm sure it was false chanterelles they ate, one died and one feel into a coma! Can't remember when and where I heard the story though?

 

Sent from Rob's GalaxySII

[Fungus]

I heard about a so called expert going in a foray with a fe friends and tasting some mushrooms, I'm sure it was false chanterelles they ate, one died and one feel into a coma! Can't remember when and where I heard the story though?

 

Rob,

People don't die or fall into a coma after eating Hygrophoropsis aurantiacus, they just suffer from gastrointestinal disorders after eating to much at a time.

And the problem of wrong identification of mushrooms mostly arises from people only looking at the pictures and not reading the descriptions of the fungi in their field guides and thinking, that all poisonous species are documented in all guides.

Edited September 26, 2011 by Fungus

[RobArb]

Haha, not sure if I've got all my information correct I'll have to dig the news story out from somewhere!

 

Sent from Rob's GalaxySII

[Tony Croft aka hamadryad]

1. Tony did, by asking whether it turned yellow when bruised and smelled of aniseed, which are characteristics of the edible Agaricus arvensis, A. silvicola and A. essettii (= A. abruptibulbus). So what would have happened, if one would have eaten A. xanthoderma because the faint smell of rubber was mistaken for the (faint) smell of aniseed ?

Last year a Dutchman, and the year before a Dutch woman died after eating field "champignons", that turned out to be whitish Amanita phalloides growing in meadows surrounded by oaks, from which roots the mycelium fruited.

And in Sweden, every year people die because they mistake Amanita virosa for Cortinarius (= Rozites) caperatus.

 

No I did not say edible, with only one educated exception I have never condoned the consumption of wild fungi, or even the harvesting, and certainly not based on photos on the WWW!

[Fungus]

No I did not say edible

 

I didn't say you said edible, I said that you, by only summing up the characterics of three edible species, left out the smell of an also yellow colouring poisonous species, Agaricus xanthoderma.

[chilli]

The only mushrooms I've ever picked & eaten were those that colleagues & I grew in the underground vaults of the bank we worked at, alongside the cash & customer valuables!