I Found This Weird Mushroom The Other Day, I Don't Expect You To Be Able To Tell What It Is From My Story

I found this weird mushroom the other day, I don't expect you to be able to tell what it is from my story because it doesn't have any pictures to go with it but you might find it cool nonetheless.

Anyway, I was picking up sticks (working for a family friend, i was being paid to do this) from a big yard when I thought I saw a little ball of Styrofoam. Being myself, I decided I was gonna nudge it around a little for fun.

Well it didn't budge at first, so I looked down and noticed how it wasn't styrofoam at all. I poked it (i had gloves on dw) and it squished, and then I kinda poked it some more until I walked away again.

Fast forward like an hour, I'm hauling this wheelbarrow of sticks and I ran right over the mushroom by accident. It split open and started oozing this sticky, runny whitish-clear liquid that bubbled a lot, which was cool to me, but I also elected to not touch my skin again with the glove in case that was toxic.

The mushroom itself was like a creamy white with some darker speckles and like I said, it looked like a ball of styrofoam at first.

Also I don't wanna send in two asks for this so, can I do a lil writing thing with the siblings au and the splitmind au like I did with the sizzling waters au?

From my first impression that sounds like a type of puffball mushroom, but the part that I’m not too sure about is the bubbly liquid. The puffballs I’m aware of have firmer spore masses or powdery ones, I can’t think of an example with a liquid interior. Stinkhorn eggs are round and filled with a pretty gross slime, but I don’t expect that the liquid would have bubbled, and they are more beige sometimes with white scaling on the top than cream. I doubt it would look like styrofoam lol. My identification knowledge comes almost exclusively from foraging books about the area live in, and we might live in very different climates. This mushroom might be one I’ve never even heard of before!

Also, I would absolutely love it if you wrote a story for my au!!! Like squeal and jump up-and-down level of happy :D

Hello! Your banner says that if you ask about mushrooms, you can talk about them for hours, let's check. 1) What is your favorite mushroom and why? 2) What effects of mushrooms on both animals and people do you know? 3) From question 2, which effect do you like the most in terms of effectiveness? 4) What do you think of the cordyceps mushroom? 5) What is your favorite dish based on mushrooms or a dish where mushrooms are an additive?

!!WARNING!! I am not a mycologist or fungi expert! I'm just a girl who has been hyperfixated on mycology for three years and counting lmfao. My information comes mostly from books written by mycologists and expert foragers, but take this all with a grain of salt lol. I do not know everything, and there's a chance I'm straight-up wrong about some of this! I don't think I am, I would never intentionally spread incorrect information, but be careful just in case! anyways, mandatory warning out of the way, on to the potentially-partially-misinformed-but-I-don't-think-it-is infodump!!!

1)

Okay, I think this is the seventh time I’ve answered the question about my favourite mushroom 😭, I’ll answer again instead of just linking it this time lol.

I have a few favourites for a few different reasons!

The violet court/webcap (more than the viscid violet court, but I do love that one too lol) is one of my favourites purely because it is a beautiful rich purple to black colour- it’s really pretty! I also like the bluefoot bonnet, and the newly discovered Mycena subcyanocephala mushroom and the Stropharia caerulea mushrooms are also beautiful. Bioluminescent fungi are absolutely mesmerizing in the dark too! I couldn’t pick my favourite beautiful mushroom lol.

For sentimental reasons, the mica cap mushroom was the first one that I ever spore-printed, the prince mushroom was the first one I ever foraged and ate, and the king oyster was the first one I ever grew myself!

2)

…okay, I know a lot. I mostly just know of their effects on humans though, so apologies. I’ll rant about one particular poisonous example to start, the destroying angel! It’s a particularly brutal one, because the symptoms often won’t show up for hours or even days after you ate the mushroom, and a lot of times at that point it’s already too late. It also has a brief period where you think or feel like you’re getting better, before it comes back in full swing to kill you. Typical symptoms of a messed up stomach, along with kidney and/or liver failure. It’s brutal, and it’s very common for patients who are hospitalized by it to die, because by the time they feel bad enough to go to the hospital, the poison is well in their systems. It’s closely related to the death cap, and together they are known as the deadly duo. Another interesting one is the Alcohol Inky, Inky cap or Tippler’s bane mushroom! It’s edible- unless you have alcohol in your system. Even the tiniest bit before or after eating this mushroom (with a four-day buffer) will set off poisonous reactions! Hence the name “Tippler’s bane” lol. On a more positive note, there’s tons of medical mushrooms! Turkey tail has been used to strengthen the immune system of cancer patients. The agarikon has been used to strengthen lungs, treat asthma and help with coughs! Of course, a famous example of a medical fungi is the penicillin vaccine that saved polio patients, but I don’t know too much about that so I’ll try to avoid spreading false information lol. It is amazing though! Even psilocybe- magic mushrooms- have been used to treat PTSD, OCD, depression etc. (CLINICALLY of course, don’t do drugs kids lmao). Hallucinogenic mushrooms are a whole other story about their effects on humans and other animals, and I admit I’m not that knowledgeable about that side of the foraging appeal lol. LSD is kinda wack, to put it bluntly. You kinda have to do shrooms to properly understand the effects lmfao- You gotta be one with the mushroom, man.

3)

Personally, I haven’t experienced any of these effects myself. I have yet to poison myself, I tend to turn to Tylenol instead of fungi when I’m sick and I haven’t done shrooms lmao. I think that the poisonous mushrooms are very cool and effective, there are so many different ways that fungi can try to kill a human, and it’s very fascinating how they each go about it! The death cap in particular is a very effective killer, so props to it.

4)

ah, cordyceps. The inspiration for The Last of Us, one of the finest irl body horror parasites, an equally disturbing and fascinating fungi!

I think cordyceps is a very incredible fungi, although I’d probably have a different opinion if I was a particularly unlucky bug who got infected with it. For those of you who don’t know what cordyceps is, it’s a brutal parasitic fungi responsible for the horrors known as zombie ants. A mycelium system grows inside the ant and fucks up its head, in the simplest of terms. The ant suddenly has a very strong urge to climb, and so it does, typically to the underside highest leaf it can get to. From there, it locks it’s mandibles to the leaf and stays there until it dies (this can take a few days, which must really suck for the ant). The mycelium makes itself known, attaching to the leaf and making the ant appear white and fuzzy, and then a mushroom pops out of its body and spreads its spores far and wide to go commit more atrocities in the cordyceps family name.

cordyceps isn’t the only fungi that’s parasitic on insects, although it is perhaps the best known. Some fungi in this parasite branch are even parasitic on other fungi, while some are the boogeymen haunting the dreams of larvae, caterpillars, spiders and more. Luckily none go after humans, so we’re safe for now! Insects are simply smaller and easier to take over, and aren’t filled with as much blood, complicated organs, immune system defences and body heat. Fungi could probably figure out a way to do this to us, but it’s simply more convenient for them to not. There are tons of fungi that are parasitic to humans though, they just don’t turn us into zombies!

5)

This Morel soup I had at a mycology convention once. It was so fire lmao.

I’M THE ONE WITH A SUGAR ADDICTION??? MX. “MY WATER BOTTLE IS ALWAYS FULL OF EITHER ICED TEA OR COKE BECAUSE I DON’T DRINK WATER” OVER HERE IS TRYING TO CLAIM THAT I’M THE ONE ADDICTED TO SUGAR???????????

(Also sleep is for the weak which is why you always go to bed before 10pm like a short little nerd while I stay up past 3am like a cool person and chug caffine to keep myself alive)

GUYS @infernogoddes9 IS ONLINE THIS ONLY HAPPENS LIKE ONCE A MONTH (side-eyeing you very hard rn Inferno) (with the eye that works too)

Lol imagine eating healthy and taking steroids that’s kinda cringe

I, an upstanding citizen, eat UNHEALTHY and take METH as god intended

GUYS @infernogoddes9 IS ONLINE THIS ONLY HAPPENS LIKE ONCE A MONTH (side-eyeing you very hard rn Inferno) (with the eye that works too)

Another one

(at least one of us can see lmao)

First of all I said “come say hi to my followers!” And THIS is all you have to tell them??? Tsk tsk tsk shaking my head at you

second WHAT IS IT WITH YOU AND BABY CARROTS WHY DO YOU EAT SO MANY

GUYS @infernogoddes9 IS ONLINE THIS ONLY HAPPENS LIKE ONCE A MONTH (side-eyeing you very hard rn Inferno) (with the eye that works too)