Welcome back to Mushroom Monday, your weekly look at some of PEI’s easy-to-identify fungi. Today’s mushroom is large, showy, common, and generates a lot of “can I eat this?” questions. This is Fly Agaric (Amanita muscaria var. guessowii).
“Can I eat this?” should never be the first question you ask about a plant or mushroom. It’s important that the initial focus of would-be foragers be on learning basic identification skills: what is it and why is it that?
The risks of not taking the time to build basic skills before eating are twofold. First, you can’t tell whether the information you’ve been given is reliable. This time of year, I see frequent social media posts asking about mushroom edibility, with dozens of one-word (often conflicting!) answers. Do you really want to trust your health to someone you don’t know who told you a plant or fungus was OK to eat? Asking for help with identification is very different from asking about edibility.
Second, if you don’t know how to identify a mushroom that someone else said is edible, you won’t know it again if you see it. You may have an edible Meadow Mushroom (Agaricus sp.) this time, but can you tell it from inedible members of the same genus, or other toxic mushrooms that resemble it? Before you eat something, you should be able to confidently and reliably identify it. Learning the beginner-level mushrooms in this weekly series is a good place to start.
Fly Agaric has varieties that are yellow (Photo 1), orange (Photo 2), or red, with the latter looking like the typical mushroom emoji. Like all Amanitas, this mushroom starts out covered in something called a ‘universal veil’, making it resemble an egg-shaped Puffball. (That’s one reason why it’s important to look inside what you think is a Puffball to be sure it’s solid white, with no ghostly outline of a mushroom). As Fly Agaric grows, that veil stretches and breaks apart (Photo 3), leaving warts on the cap. Some individuals will have lots of warts but others have almost none, and they can be washed away by rain.
Under an Amanita’s cap are white gills and a white stem that’s typically wider toward the bottom. Some species – including Fly Agaric – have a skirt-like ring near the top (Photo 4). That skirt is the remnant of a partial veil that covered the gills, protecting those all-important, spore-bearing surfaces until they matured. If you carefully dig up the base of your Amanita, you’ll find a bulb-like ‘volva’ that was the bottom of the universal veil. The size and shape of the volva are important to identification of many species; with Fly Agaric, there is a series of shaggy, concentric rings above the bulb.
Fly Agaric grows directly from the ground (rather than from living or dead wood) but does form relationships with nearby trees. It’s common in grassy areas, lawns, parks, old fields, and even sand dunes. The large size, bright colour, and appearance in human habitats make it a mushroom virtually everyone sees.
The genus Amanita includes some of the most poisonous mushrooms we have. Fly Agaric doesn’t contain the deadly amatoxins of some of its relatives, but it does have the neurotoxins muscarine and ibotenic acid which can cause hallucinations and cognitive impairment. Although some people use this species recreationally (with special preparation), related effects have included seizures, coma, and retrograde amnesia.
Too much can Fly Agaric can also cause serious illness or death, and it’s impossible to know how much of the toxins are in any one mushroom. Every year, there are hospitalizations due to intentional and accidental ingestions of this species, with outcomes ranging from mild to severe. Fly Agaric can be made edible (again, with special preparation), but that’s not something I’d recommend for beginners.
Toxic mushrooms aren’t something to fear, and they can’t hurt you unless you eat them. Edible or not, Fly Agaric is an eye-catching and beautiful part of PEI untamed!
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