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When I was younger, I was taught not to pick up or eat colorful mushrooms - the more colors they had, the deadlier they were, supposedly. At the time, I thought
by ayakura 7y ago
When I was younger, I was taught not to pick up or eat colorful mushrooms - the more colors they had, the deadlier they were, supposedly. At the time, I thought it made sense as the same rule applied for poisonous frogs.
After reading the article and looking at Wikipedia's list of deadly fungus species, I'm not so sure if that rule also applies to mushrooms: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_deadly_fungus_species https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_deadly_fungus_species
- jpuderer 7y agoA surprising number of people seem to think that. No correlation AFAICT. Some of the best mushrooms are colorful (eg. chanterelles).
- somehnguy 7y agoChanterelles are great because there are only 2 other mushrooms that are even close in resemblance and neither of them is particularly poisonous. One just tastes bad and the other will cause a stomach ache. They're also very easy to tell apart from the real deal even for a novice like me. Harvested and ate a bunch a few weekends ago with a buddy. Delicious.
- amatecha 7y agoWord - I just foraged a bunch of them recently! Once you find them, more are usually nearby! Also, once you've had them on hand enough, it becomes easy to identify them with a very high degree of certainty.
- pugworthy 7y agoAbsolutely - like the perfect mushroom being super unique, and super tasty.
- mda 7y agoYou mean Omphalotus olearius and Hygrophoropsis aurantica? First one could be very nasty, maybe not deadly but very painful. Easily possible to confuse with Cantharellus cibarius, See https://www.wemjournal.org/article/S1080-6032(15)00475-5/pdf https://www.wemjournal.org/article/S1080-6032(15)00475-5/pdf
- somehnguy 7y agoYup the Jack 'o Lantern and False Chanterelle. I misremembered, I guess it is more than a mild stomach ache (but still not likely to really hurt you). But it looks nothing like the chanterelle as long as your criteria includes more than 'its orange'.
- throwaway2048 7y agoThere are essentially no general hard and fast rules like that when it comes to mushroom hunting, there is no substitute for knowing how to positively identify specific species, where specific species should be growing, and knowing what distinguishes them from similar poisonous species.
- dmurray 7y agoI don't see why this could possibly get downvoted, it's absolutely true. If you do have a "hard and fast" rule in mind, it may work in your region but not in other places.
- DuskStar 7y agoBesides the trivial rule of "pick no mushrooms", of course.
- Alex3917 7y ago> If you do have a "hard and fast" rule in mind, it may work in your region but not in other places. There are lots of hard and fast rules in different regions though that do work if you can ID the mushroom to genus. E.g. in New England, no green mushrooms in the Russula genus are poisonous.
- linuskendall 7y agoWe were taught to avoid white mushrooms, as in our area the poisionous ones you might mistake for edible ones are white.