Context: after eating a death cap (Amanita phalloides), you'd notice a few of the symptoms at first, but these usually resolve after a day or two. After this, you'll enter a latent phase where you feel fine, but your liver and kidneys slowly start to fail. By the time you notice, it's usually already too late.

So it's like radiation poisoning, then?

Omae wa mou shindeiru ass-mushroom

The rabies of mushrooms

I had rabies, but after a few days I felt better.

It's not just similar, it's the same symptom - they both kill you through damaging your cells' ability to create proteins, radiation through damage to the DNA itself, and amatoxins from deadly mushrooms through blocking of the cell's ability to read DNA to create mRNA, which is necessary for protein synthesis.

Every. Single. Time.

Would you like a glass of water?

As much as I would want a death cap mushroom! Both can and will kill you!

So not wanting the water then? I have bad news for you...

Oh! "Neat".

Allright if you're gonna be like that just give me the damn mushroom.

Don't do it! It's a trap!

Don't you know mushrooms are mostly made out of water!?

I fucking knew they were in cahoots!

Fucking dicks.

Don't forage for mushrooms unless you identify them in multiple ways, from multiple guidebooks, and ask locals what's around, first.

There are quite a few types of mushrooms that don't have any poisonous lookalikes, that is once you know what to look for.

Oyster mushrooms, golden (and winter) chanterelles, puffballs (IFF you slice them and make sure there's no 'mushroom' outline within!!!), hedgehogs, boletes.

My knowledge is restricted to the PNW (Pacific North-West) however, so also read on regional variations.

https://northernbushcraft.com/mushrooms/britishcolumbia.php

Apparently there's also AI generated guidebooks, which look completely legitimate but are actually random nonsense.

You want the one with the crazy looking guy in the tux with a trumpet

50-50 you find him at a ska show

I wouldn't trust books when it comes to hunting mushrooms, slop or not.

Don't go hunting mushrooms unless your family's taken you hunting mushrooms since you were a kid (and even then only in regions you're familiar with, and even then don't pick any mushroom you're not 110% certain of, and if you're not an idiot), or accompanied by someone with that experience verifying every single mushroom you find before picking it up, and telling you why and how it'd've killed you or why it wouldn't've tasted good.

Unless you are with Stamets and he tries it first, you shouldn't eat foraged mushrooms.

Generally speaking, the only safe wild mushroom is one you saw someone else eat a few days ago and they are still fine.

Not true at all, honestly kind of fear mongering. Mushrooms like morels are extremely hard to mistake unless you resist all forms of obvious Id.

I think I would rather just start growing my own instead.

Morrells are the one real exception because they are so easily distinguished from lookalikes.

My daughter foraged some oyster mushrooms. I did a lot of research before letting her eat them, but came to the same conclusion — there's nothing else you'd mistake for it. She fried them up in some oil. They were fine. I had some. Definitely could use a better recipe than "pour oil, make mushroom hot" but they were edible.

But pretty much everything else we've found has been in the class of, "might taste gross or it might taste gross and kill you." Thanks, I hate it!

Here in the PNW you can grow mushrooms on your car if you wanted. Its dark and soggy.

✨everything the rain promises and more✨
Or something like that

NANI

That's funny, you are like opposite me.

There are a lot of exceptions, Morrells are actually one of the few mushrooms that can kill you or make you very ill if you don't cook them long enough, so I wouldn't even call them exceptions. They still require knowledge and prep. That includes chicken of the woods which can be dangerous depending on which tree it's growing on.

Oyster mushrooms on the west coast of the US are a fair bet, someone in this same thread made a good list, but it's regional. A high percentage of the poisonings in California (Australia too as I understand it) used to be SE Asians who mistook them for paddy-straw mushrooms. A lot of these articles are saying that it's more wide spread this time because of "naive" people harvesting. I hope it's not like food insecure people trying to fill caloric gaps...

There are plenty of amateurs who rise to the ranks of expert, but the consequences of error can be very high. I recommend anyone who wants to harvest to learn to spore print as part of identification. Harvesting any wild edibles requires a lot of research, mushrooms topping that list by a fair margin.

Good advice, but respectfully there are some trustworthy books. So long as the reader actually follows all of the verification steps in those books.

And definitely not those fly-by-night, probably AI-generated 'slop' books online!.

My wife & I only moved out to the west coast in our 40s, and in the decade since, we (slowly! carefully!) learned how to recognize the safe species. Just don't take any stupid risks -- be absolutely sure of an ID before eating. Show what you've collected first, if it's a new one, to someone local who knows and learn from their experience.

One good book is All That The Rain Promises ...

it destroys your liver if you dont treat it quickly. destroying angels are related to death caps, just as deadly.

I had a whole wild mushroom farm going on my front lawn earlier this winter

For those who have experience, yes -- but to the inexperienced eye, there are some false morels that can definitely trick people.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=morel+lookalike+gyromytra&t=vivaldi&ia=web

We have some Gyromitra that pop up every year in one area of our backyard. They produce a molecule, gyromitrin, which is metabolized in the body into monomethylhydrazine, which is used in rocket fuel(!)... So be careful.

Apparently Gyromitra are consumed in Europe by some -- but only after careful preparation... I am not brave enough to try that :/

If all mushrooms are edible but some are only edible once, the latency makes the death cap one of the few mushrooms that’s edible a few times.

The cover of that book is something else hahaha

How do you even treat that? Seems like a pretty permanently damaging toxin?

📸

The damage is permanent on a cellular level - the affected cells will either die, or in the case of radiation exposure, can become cancerous instead. If you got a small enough exposure, and immediately sought medical attention to remove the toxin from your body in the case of amatoxin ingestion, then only some cells will be affected, and maybe your organs can continue functioning and eventually recover after the affected cells die off. If the damage is significant, you might survive if you get a liver transplant and dialysis, since the liver and kidneys are the most affected due to their role in filtering and removing toxens.

Oh how "fun"

Nothing wrong with picking a mushroom to ID at home or at an ID clinic run by your local mycology club. You should individually inspect each specimen as you're cleaning them anyway so you can throw out any which might be going bad, chock full of bugs, or misidentified.

When in doubt, throw it out.

If wish to learn how to forage for mushrooms, join a local mycology club and go out with them. They can identify mushrooms for you and teach you how to do so yourself. They can also recommend good local field guides, I see a few folks in this thread recommending All that the rain promises and More which is a reputable guide but it's also spectacularly out of date and only applicable to Western North America.

It's important to know what you're doing but mushroom identification is not nearly as difficult as some of the comments here make it out to be. There are far fewer deadly mushrooms out there than most people think and it's fairly easy to familiarize yourself with all the deadly species in your area so you can avoid them.

Thanks! Great read up on something I knew nothing about.

These are edible (small amount), with very colorfull side effects

For those that missed it, I was referring to rabies and hydrophobia.