Oy! I forgot to post this this morning. Well, better late than never.
Reader Tony Eales from Brisbane sent us some nice mushroom photos, most of which are unidentified (readers are welcome to help). His notes are indented:
We had some decent rain after a long hot dry period and I went to the local national park to see what was out and about. What was out was an amazing variety of mushrooms. I only have names for a couple.
The yellow ones are probably Amanita sp. maybe Amanita flavella. Aminita muscaria is the famous fly agaric mushroom reputedly used to get berserkers into their homicidal trances. So I probably wouldn’t try eating that.
The large one with a hairy top is Boletellus emodensis which is apparently edible but tasteless and leathery.
My favourite were several little bright red ones, likely of the genus Hygrocybe The rest I don’t know: the first two may well be Amanita again.
Sub
The shroom is underrated https://noelliesplace.com/2018/08/16/fungus-among-us/
Beautiful!
Wonderful ‘shroom pictures, thank you for sharing with us!
+ 1
Very nice! Is the generalization true that mushrooms with a lower skirt on their stem are poisonous?
Not quite. Check e.g. this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amanita_caesarea
Generalization with mushrooms invariably fail, and this is why there are so many poisonings :-(.
The mycologists I’ve known over the years would stop you at the “generalization” and say “generalizations about fungi are untrue”. And a lot of them are dangerously untrue.
If you don’t know for sure that it’s safe to eat, assume it’s lethal.
Last fall I had the opportunity to stay 4 days at a B & B run by a Chinese lady who really knew her edible mushrooms. Every morning I was presented with a fantastic breakfast with some different kinds I had never heard of. Tasty! But having taken a course in fungi during my Biology undergrad, there is no way I will be trying to identify/consume wild ones myself (other than maybe morels and puffballs). Took a bunch of photos of some myself though, a few years back. Someday I will do a series of paintings of them 🙂
Beautiful fungi photos! Thanks!
Nice for me to see mushrooms from the Southern hemisphere. They look remarkably similar to those I saw on several Northern continents. Some of those shown here might be amanitas. To be sure one has to look at the underside of the cap and at the very bottom of the stem. The effects of muscaria are harmless compared with some of the other amanitas, which upon consumption can be deadly. They are the only type of mushroom I know to be fatal. Beware!
Love the red “fungulars”😍
The actor Luke Perry just got buried in a mushroom suit as part of an eco-friendly ceremony: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/48140812
Great photos. It’s finally rained here in South Australia, so I must go out and look for fungi. I have heard it said with regard to mushroom toxicity that : ‘there are old mushroom hunters; there are bold mushroom hunters, but there are no old, bold mushroom hunters’.
Thanks for showing us the mushrooms!