Comment on Mushroom ID

• Risk@feddit.uk ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  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.

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  • Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    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.

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    • teejay@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      This is the same reason that you never touch something that looks like a carrot plant in the wild

      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.

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      • Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        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.

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      • shneancy@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        yeah do watch out for hemlock plants, they look very similar to wild carrots

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      • ExtraPartsLeft@kbin.social ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        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.

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    • fossilesque@mander.xyz ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      If anyone is curious about the carrot mention, Google where the phrase “Sardonic Grin” came from.

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      • SpiderShoeCult@sopuli.xyz ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        Huh. I was thinking Aconitum species when they mentioned carrots.

        Sardonic grin just mentions strychnine poisoning, which comes from a tree.

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    • MonkeMischief@lemmy.today ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      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.

      Okay so when you said “Never touch” I was thinking casually "Oh, don’t go messing with it or munching on it or whatever.

      Looking it up, oh…poison hemlock…you were being dead-exact.

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      “As his doctor, Christopher Hayner, MD, pointed out, LeBlond didn’t have to eat the poisonous plant to fall ill. “Anything you can touch, you can also inhale,” he explained to Good Housekeeping. When LeBlond used a chainsaw to cut down the hemlock, tiny particles scattered in the air, and when he breathed them in, they almost killed him.”

      Oh holy crap. Kill it with fire!

      “If you do find a suspicious stalk and want to remove it, wear gloves, a face mask, and protective clothing. Dig it out from the roots, rather than cutting it, and never burn it, as the fumes can cause a reaction.”

      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. 😬

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  • LibertyLizard@slrpnk.net ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    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 your 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.

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    • chumbalumber@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      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).

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    • Risk@feddit.uk ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Perhaps I should have said ‘categorically’ instead of ‘definitively’, but they are synonyms so…

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      • LibertyLizard@slrpnk.net ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        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.

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• LibertyLizard@slrpnk.net ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Lots of differences but the simplest one would be that button mushrooms would typically have color to their gills—they usually start out pinkish and move to 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.

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  • Kimano@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    “Destroying Angel” is an incredibly metal name for a mushroom lmao.

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