Pine cone Amanita mushroom, Amanita ravenelii + other Lepidella/Roanokenses Amanita mushrooms

Описание: In this video, I discuss a large, creamy-colored mushroom called Amanita ravenelii commonly called the pine cone Amanita. Amanita ravenelii has a pungent chlorine aroma, bulbous base, and radially arranged warts on the cap. Amanita ravenelii often features shags of tissue on the edge of the cap and a bit of orange-brown bruising around cracks and fissures in the bulbous stem base. The pine cone Amanita is not edible, and the chlorine smell is astonishingly unappetizing. However, the pine cone Amanita and its relatives are beautiful mushrooms to find and photograph, and their deep, creamy gills often teem with beetles that apparently like the peed-in-pool smell (and taste, perhaps??) of this mushroom.

The pine cone Amanita and several similar species are common and highly conspicuous throughout the summer mushroom season in North Carolina and other southeastern states. Amanita ravenelii and other large, white-to-cream colored Amanitas like Amanita rhopalopus and Amanita daucipes are frequently identified as part of the Lepidella section of the Amanita genus in books and on forums, though my understanding is that many of them are moving to Amanita section Roanokenses. I am not an Amanita expert, and I use both the term "Lepidella" and "Roanokenses" to research these mushrooms because the latter name is not widespread yet.

No matter the name, I delight in finding these mushrooms because of their size, splendor, and preposterous aromas. So if you’re baffled by the frisbee-sized whitish mushrooms you see (and smell) all summer, this video is intended to help you with the basics.