Happens to some SE Asians in North America too, because the edible straw mushroom from SE Asia resembles one here called "death cap". Amanita phalloides. What's fucked up is right before it kills you your symptoms actually improve, so people get discharged from the hospital and think they are going to be ok.
I forage mushrooms but I stay away from white gilled mushrooms completely.
Yeah I had my yard full of destroying angels last summer, when they first showed up I was all "sweet! Mushrooms!" Because they look real similar to agaricus. But then I saw the white gills, and was all :(.
And I made sure to tell my kids not to mess with them and why.
Don't use mushroom ID apps and don't trust random guidebooks from Amazon, they're probably AI-generated crap.
The deadly mycotoxin orellanine, which is present in Cortinarius rubellus, the deadly webcap, may not cause symptoms in those who ingested the mushroom until one or two weeks have passed – after detectable traces of the toxin are already gone, and late-stage kidney failure has already begun. Connecting the sickness with certainty to a misidentified wild mushroom that was eaten weeks earlier with no obvious ill effects is not always possible.
Yeah, I'm just staying away from that. There are enough other things that can end up in my frying pan with less crawling through the woods while hanging my continued existence on my ability to read and memorize two books worth of not-plant-descriptions.
That is until you realize there was another mushroom that looks just like the one you were looking for that kills you... which is the point of the post
That’s chicken of the woods, named for its flavor. If you see something that makes you say “that looks like chicken of the woods” it’s because it’s chicken of the woods.
How about when you are the first person to discover there IS a deadly lookalike to chicken of the woods?
I get your point but yeah - mushrooms are not going to be my goto if I'm stranded in the woods, and it sounds like they really shouldn't be the goto of anyone not already an experienced mushroom forager before they end up stranded in the woods.
Well, during a recent wave of mushroom poisoning people were told that mushrooms can interbreed to create mixed new variants and so one mushroom might not stay one mushroom for long if the conditions allow for it.
