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Great big mushroom. Edible?


sarcomere

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Just found this cluster of mushrooms in some wood chips by my house. Plucked one to get some better pics of the gills and stem. Any thoughts as to the identification of this beast? Would love to know if it's edible. It has so much firm meat!

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Cluster:

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Clusters of older mushrooms right beside. Maybe same species:

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Looks like an inedible Gymnopilus Ventricosus. Do a spore print, it would be rusty orange. You can nibble a small amount & spit it out. Bitter taste in Gymnopilus. The website Fungi of California has a species index that has photos of this.

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On 4/19/2021 at 4:54 AM, bobby b said:

Looks like an inedible Gymnopilus Ventricosus. Do a spore print, it would be rusty orange. You can nibble a small amount & spit it out. Bitter taste in Gymnopilus. The website Fungi of California has a species index that has photos of this.

Gotcha thanks for pointing me in the right direction. I got a spore print, definitely rusty brown. I was wondering, though, how can you tell the difference - or is there a difference - between the ventricosus and the spectabilis? I was reading through the section for this mushroom in David Arora’s book and he mentions that the variant spectabilis has psychoactive properties (also referred to as the laughing gym). But online I see that these two names are often used interchangeably, which is kind of confusing. 

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It is confusing, G. ventricosus is a west coast species which mushroomexpert.com says grows only on conifer wood and caps can be 16 inches accross. G. junonius and G. spectibilis are synonyms according to mushroomexpert.com and are widely distributed in N.A.  Some say that G junonius doesn't even occur in N.A.  Here's a short article on the G. junonius group, New species in the Gymnopilus junonius group (Basidiomycota: Agaricales)  Maybe Dave W, this web sites resident expert, will weigh in.

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There seems to be a fair amount of confusion regarding the taxonomy of the North American species of Gymnopilus that produce robust mushrooms. I think maybe the ones that occur in large clusters that appear to be terrestrial (actually from buried roots) are either G. ventricosus and G. velatipes. The links below lead to MO observations featuring discussions that highlight the confusion surrounding the use of these names.

https://mushroomobserver.org/114608?q=o9Pq       https://mushroomobserver.org/111688?q=1gX0X

Notice in the second link that "G. ventricosus" had been proposed as the ID based upon the belief that the observation originated in Washington State. I just corrected this location error, and I think it's likely that G. ventricosus may actually not apply to the Pennsylvania observation. But, the mushrooms seen in this second link do look like the ones being discussed here on WMH. So, by way of an apparent error (on my part) it looks like Gymnopilus ventricosus may be the best proposal for sarcomere's mushrooms.

When David Arora wrote Mushrooms Demystified the name Gymnopilus spectabilus had been applied to North American collections, probably to a variety of different species. My understanding is that the current status of G. spectabilus is that this species does not occurr in NA. I think there's also similar doubt regarding the application of the name Gymnopilus junonius to NA material. 

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