Adrianna Tan
I’ve been a few mushroom forays recently. The advice is clear: if you’re in California, do not put any wild mushrooms in your mouth especially this year
We have many lookalikes that look ‘safe’. More than 40 people have been poisoned, 3-4 dead, since Nov. many of them immigrants who are misled by some of our deathly mushrooms looking exactly the same as the ones they know
Adrianna Tan
@Shunra the field guides and local experts are saying not to eat anything at all this year
Most people who have been poisoned are immigrants who are not part of any local mycology club or group and mistake it for the mushrooms they like back home
Dena
@skinnylatte oh, for heaven's sake! People should key out mushrooms with on-paper field guides. Not guess. And never trust "AI" or assume that looks are sufficient for identification.
Adrianna Tan
@Shunra there’s a theory that we are having more toxic mushrooms than usual because of the heavier rains recently
Mycology groups are saying it’s pretty unusual and really don’t recommend it
Dena
@skinnylatte are experts saying there's something different about the mushrooms? or are they just assuming identification will be mishandled?
I ask because I was planning to forage agin this year (as I've done, local field-guides in hand, for more than 40 years. I'll avoid it if there's something in the environment that merits such a change.)
Adrianna Tan
@sarae there are many other mushrooms here that are deadly that are not amanitas. Some of them look like normal boring mushrooms
Sara
@skinnylatte and thinking about it, I do see more amanitas the last couple of years
but almost exclusively in town, in landscaped areas, lawns, etc
I think some of the big commercial growers of nursery plants on the west coast are infected and carrying spores around, and that they're also maybe moving on commercial landscaping equipment
Sara
@skinnylatte I have to wonder if one of the issues is that there are suddenly a lot of AI mushroom guides out there
because while it's pretty easy to confuse some edible east Asian mushrooms with some not-edible Pacific US mushrooms
that's not what seems to be the issue in the cases I've read about lately
it is really NOT easy to confuse amanitas with anything else
absent serious misinformation
William B Peckham
@skinnylatte I grew up in a place where morale mushrooms could be found if you knew where to look, and I can recognize them. There's a whole family of mushrooms called puff balls that are all safe to eat, although they don't all taste good. I just go by the assumption that unless I'm with somebody that knows what they're doing, anything else that looks like a mushroom that's not a puffball and it's not a morale might be deadly.
Adrianna Tan
@wbpeckham California has many false morels
Adrianna Tan
@number6 California has false morels
Number6 :syncthing:
What about morels? They're very distinctive compared to these capped mushrooms.
Adrianna Tan
@sarae I think the problem is that at various stages, the amanitas look like other mushrooms, so advice to ‘avoid amanita’ doesn’t help people who are picking them thinking they are something else
Sara
@skinnylatte uh, the links you've posted are about amanitas
if there's something else that's an issue, can you share where you're seeing that?
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