I simply mentioned Conocybe to remind people that P.semilanceata is NOT idiot-proof. Better to give advice and offer knowledge which (hopefully) turns out unneeded than for me to withhold the knowledge I may freely offer for the taking and have somebody lacking it, need it, and end up chowing down on a bunch of amatoxic mushrooms. What is the worse of the two outcomes? a post that takes no effort on my part whatsoever, to proffer knowledge that has been ingrained in my wetware as deeply as the haemoglobin in my red blood cells since age 4 (not joking either. I learned to read by teaching myself using Phillips's textbook. ) and a minute or two to type not saving a life, or somebody remaining unknowing of the potential, who is very new to picking then dying or ending up on the liver transplant list and suffering horribly, just because a grizzled ol' git of a mycophage was stingy with what he knows and is happy to teach?
My money is on the poor bastard shitting his liver out in milkshake form and doing it from both ends simultaneously whilst his kidneys fail and his plasma electrolyte levels go so screwy it causes his brain to swell, assisted by hepatic encephalopathy with, given it isn't your typical Amanita, a likely non-recognisance of the typical signs of amatoxin poisoning by medics, IF the patient presents in time for agressive treatment to reduce the untreated fatality rate from at best, a fifty-fifty chance of survival and at worst about 90 percent death rate (estimated given the fatality rate of toxicity as a result of consumption of the more typical amatoxin sources, Amanita phalloides and A.virosa)
Personally I'd rather have been offered the info and known to watch out if I were as green as the grass I was poking around in regarding mushrooms, than have somebody who knew, be too lazy to provide the information that allowed me to avoid making myself a case-study of the above. People mistake FIELD MUSHROOMS and HORSE MUSHROOMS....fucking AGARICUS species for Amanita spp., which have WHITE gills (with of course the exception of Amanita chlorinosma which has greenish gills, at least when the spores mature enough to color the gills)
That, IMO is a really, really REALLY elementary, n00b type of mistake to make. Making a mis-ID of a grassland group of species (for the most part of the Agaricus genus) that contains, bar the lethal species known in tropical africa, Agaricus aurantioviolaceous, at worst, a bunch of mostly somewhat off-smelling, yellow-staining species which will make you, at the very worst, pretty sick to the stomach, bad GI upset) and at first pink growing to chocolate-brown gills for afaik exclusively mycorrhizal species with usually white gills, and a very few with orange, plus one species with greenish gills. ) That is a mistake I wouldn't have made when I was out of fucking diapers, yet people have made it. Point-people can, and do screw up, when they are new to mushroom hunting, all the more so. Or foreign. (notably southeast asian natives coming to the UK and US, then consuming Volvariella speciosa, or rather, thinking they are, and getting one or other of the whitish and damnably nasty Amanita species.
And as for the earlier post I missed about the bumper harvest of ceps-lucky bastard. Found a nice few myself this year, not a bumper crop, but did find this year an exceptional year for Boletes of various kinds, got a LOT of larch boletes and slippery jacks, as well as Xerocomus badius/formerly Boletus badius, the bay bolete, aka good eating, if you get to them before them bloody fungus gnat larvae turn them to shit. Found shedloads of those three, interspersed with the odd cep during a walk round a reservoir thats mixed acidic pinewood and deciduous soil, when I was out there to bag the sacks full of Lactarius deliciosus (saffron milkcap) that I keep that spot high priority for to check out every year, since those buggers are GOOD eating and then some. Was a good one this year too, got plenty with caps as wide as side-plate type dinnerplates, and not old manky ones but good, firm, fresh ones with just a hint of green tinge here and there belying their youth.
Found it to be a good year for ergot (Claviceps purpurea) too, not that you want to just pop those in your mouth and chew on them. From several different places distant to each other, so hopefully good variety of genetic material for crossbreeding experiments amongst the other experiments planned for those wee pointy purple parasites
Last year, got lucky enough to find what I'm almost certain, was (now Rubroboletus) Boletus satanas, too, on a local field. Keeping me eyes out for them this coming year (saw them last year, year before and year before that but not this year, big, fat red going to yellow, reticulated stems, as fat as the caps, turnip shaped and with a stench so foetid that a single fruitbody I brought in had to be removed from the house, because it stank my bedroom up something vile, enough to almost make me throw up.
And that takes some doing, considering a few of the things that have escaped the confines of the flasks and test tubes now and again, that have really taken the biscuit when it comes to barf-fuel. I've smelled a few of the nuclear options when it comes to puke-a-licious. And B.satanas has a reputation amongst the scarlet-pored Boletus spp. with big, fat, reticulated, bicolored stipes for packing a revolting reek of decaying flesh. Which is exactly what these buggers smelled like.
Keeping my eyes out every year in future, so I can, hopefully, find more, and both do enough examinations, chemical tests and microscopy to get enough data to rule out or justify my sending in samples to kew gardens for professional ID and take as much in the way of spores as I can, and attempt to culture the fungus by saturating samples of soil taken from the regions close to the fruitbodies hopefully already host to the mycelium, and cultures of the oak trees they naturally associate with, try culture them like they do with truffles. Not that anyone wants to eat them, but because they are so, so SO vanishingly rare as for some to consider them near extinct in the UK, and scarce across europe too. So anything, anything at all I can do to propagate the species, despite its high toxicity is a good thing, from a conservation point of view, got something similar in mind for one of the waxcaps, a couple of spots I know for, Hygrocybe calyptraeformis, a pointed, pale pink, edible waxcap, never eaten them, but do plan to try and grow them (they form an association, unusually for a mushroom, with moss species) and are on the EU red list of endangered species, but I know two spots where they are locally prolific, so a few fruitbodies can be spared, IMO, for the purpose of furthering the survival of the mushroom as a species, in the name of fighting against its extinction. Probably at least for the devil's bolete, or, if I'm wrong, one of its nearly as rare or equally so, as B.satanas, going to be one hell of a challenge but hey, as they say; if you choose a job that you enjoy, then you'll never work a day in your life.