Fungi: mycelia, mushrooms & more

Broken link?

Unfortunately, we’ve known this would happen for a while now due to the lack of care taken by AI publishers. Sad, but also people need to learn to take responsibility for checking the veracity of information they consume, no matter the source. Especially when engaging in potentially dangerous hobbies—although I will emphasize that mushroom foraging is very safe when practiced correctly and cautiously.

Ironically, the second article is not exactly correct—smell and taste are absolutely used as lines of evidence in the identification of certain mushrooms, although it’s not something I would recommend to a novice. It can be difficult to verbally define a specific smell or taste, and It’s usually only useful once you’ve already narrowed your ID to a few possible species.

There are also many tastes and odors that not everyone can detect. For myself, a very common rule of thumb for North American Agaricus mushrooms is that the poisonous species have a “phenolic” odor. Unfortunately I have no idea what this means because I’m apparently unable to smell it.

Michael Kuo, who maintains the incredible mushroomexpert.com, has described his own struggle with this odor so I am not alone in this deficiency.

So while it’s not something I would emphasize to a novice, it’s not technically inaccurate that smell and taste are sometimes used by experts to aid with or confirm identification.