Originally published at: Time lapse of an "ink cap" mushroom dripping black liquid | Boing Boing
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Neat!
Another of my favorite weirdos from the mushroom gang:
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“Ink Caps” is often used as a general name for a group of about 400 different mushrooms that are united by having really dark spores (the black goo is black because of the spores) and they like to deliquesce (convert themselves to goo as the spores mature).
Shaggy Manes (Coprinus comatus) are a popular edible. If you hunt them, be sure to cook them immediately when you get home. If you freeze them raw they will still turn to ink-like goo while frozen.
ClutchLinkey - your image is Phallus indusiatus, a stinkhorn that is cultivated in east Asia. It’s a popular edible there. It’s also the mushroom that was supposed to cause some women to have spontaneous orgasms from the odor, based on a paper published in 2001:
Soule, N., 2001: Spontaneous Female Orgasms Triggered by the Smell of a Newly Found Tropical Dictyophora Desv. Species. International Journal of Medicinal Mushrooms, 3
Of course, it doesn’t. The paper was funded by a big pharmaceutical company hoping to find true aphrodisiacs, and the study was poorly done. The company was hoping to generate some buzz and make money by selling them as a supplement, since supplements are pretty loosely regulated.
The Dictyophora name is the same species, but it’s now placed in the genus Phallus.
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User name checks out again!
I think my first post in the food thread was from my local stand of shaggy ink caps. I made a soup with roasted gourd. It was very tasty and I’ll be picking them again in a moth.
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Abortiporus biennis? Sometimes grows as a bracket, sometimes as an amorphous blob that bleeds red or orange liquid. Yours looks it hasn’t quite made up its mind.
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Inky caps are edible yes, but don’t mix with alcohol!
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That’s what iSeek thinks it is, but I don’t know anything about fungus.
They’re on my “do not forage” list, but I had a weekend about 4-6 weeks ago where I wish I knew more. A fungus growing in the back yard on old hickory wood smelled like the most earthy, meaty, delicious mushroom scent I’ve ever smelled. Some sort of bolete if I remember correctly
This is an interesting thing to me. For those who don’t know, some species like Coprinopsis atramentaria contain coprine, which we metabolize into cyclopropanone. This is similar enough to acetaldehyde to block the enzyme that processes it, which doesn’t matter much on its own, except that’s the pathway that our body uses to get rid of alcohol. Symptoms from taking them close together basically read like a hangover magnified.
Presumably this is not why the mushroom has it – blocking acetaldehyde dehydrogenase does not seem like it should matter to many predators or pathogens. I don’t know what else it might do for them though. If anyone does, I’d be really curious.
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It has a straight edge cousin
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Tippler’s Bane
New band name. Booking only addiction interventions and AA celebrations?
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