Fungi Friday: Presumptive Deadly Dapperling

It was a pleasant Thursday morning when I decided to pay my neighbour a courtesy visit. We were both busy gisting in front of his house when these cute-looking mushrooms crossed my sight. Since I was not with my phone, I asked if I could use his phone for a minute. He handed it over to me thinking I was going to make a call and looked confused when he saw me walking towards the extreme of his compound. He had no idea of what I was up to until I bent down to take a few shots of the mushrooms whose images I have shared below. That my neighbour is @zeedolf and his phone is Samsung A20. I asked him to send the images to me via Whatsapp.

Growing up, I got to know mushrooms as foods. Specifically, we use them to prepare different soups in which they often take the place of fish or meat. Back then, different species of mushrooms being sold in the market are a common sight. That is unlike what we have now. You will have to search deep in order to obtain edible mushrooms at any commercial market around.

Back then and even up till now, I do not know of any commercial mushroom farm. Instead, the species being sold in the market are usually found growing spontaneously on the farm. Since the farmers that harvest and bring them to the market for sale as foods have no scientific knowledge whatsoever, I am here wondering how the edibility of those mushrooms is determined.

Some species of mushrooms can be fatally poisonous when consumed while some are just mildly poisonous. This is largely due to the active metabolites they contain. This article by Britannica highlights 7 of the most fatally poisonous species of mushrooms in the world. How then do local uneducated farmers determine the edibility of mushrooms found growing on their farmlands? Is it just a trial an error method or there is an established procedure used in determining edibility? I have always set out to answer this question anytime I come across a species of mushroom growing in the neighbourhood.

Immediately after I saw this particular mushroom, my instinct says that it looks like one of those edible species. Often, poisonous species have these warning colourations to deter predators (hey, don't come near, imma kill you!). However, the loud colours found in some mushrooms do not necessarily indicate being poisonous, rather, they serve to attract dispersers for their spores.

Will I just go ahead, harvest, and eat this mushroom based on my instinct? That might be too dangerous. Dead men don't tell tales, yea. What I did was to search online for their look-alike images and try to get the identity of the species. Once the identity of a mushroom can be established, the edibility can be determined accordingly.

From my search, the closest to this mushroom in appearance is Lepiota brunneoincarnata, a species so poisonous it is commonly referred to as deadly dapperling. If my findings are actually correct, it reinforces the fact that assumptions can be deadly. Perhaps I would not have been alive to make this post. I hope someone can prove me right by confirming the identity of this species. Also, it would be interesting to know how local folks in other regions determine the edibility or otherwise of mushroom species found growing spontaneously in farmlands.

And this ends my humble contribution to the FungiFriday challenge, or shall I call it a contest, thrown by @ewkaw.

See you all next week, probably.