Thank you to silvercreek_garden@Flickr for sharing today's image of this fungus (original image) growing in Bellingham, Washington.
Many field guides will list the scientific name of shaggy parasol as Lepiota rachodes, but again, molecular techniques have split the traditional genus Lepiota into a number of genera. Michael Kuo of MushroomExpert.com explains the changes (and offers a few opinions) in two online articles: Lepiota and Satellite Genera and Taxonomy in Transition: The Lepiotoid Clade.
Shaggy parasol is distributed throughout much of North America and Europe. It is edible, but as silvercreek_garden notes, some people have allergic reactions to it. I suppose I should add: be absolutely certain about the identity of any mushroom before ingesting it; though difficult to mistake for anything else, there are a few lookalikes for shaggy parasol that an untrained observer might err on (including toxic amanitas). Mykoweb has a good description of Macrolepiota rachodes with comments on its lookalikes (and there is a separate page with recipes).
Botany resource link: “The Botanist Effect” (subscription required if you want to read more than the abstract), a paper in the November 2006 issue of the Journal of Biogeography by Moerman and Esterbrook. The subtitle provides a good summary: “Counties with maximal species richness tend to be home to universities and botanists”.
Beautifully captured! A great fungus shot!
Loving the fungi photos, Daniel. They're such under-appreciated life forms.
Have you ever done a series of lichen photos? If not, could you be tempted?
Cheers,
Margaret
Margaret, I'd like to share more lichen photographs, but I'm limited by a couple things: 1) there are few identified lichen photographs submitted and 2) my inability to sight-identify either the lichens in other people's photographs or even my own – even for the ones I photograph, I don't have a kit of chemicals to help identify them in the field.
I sometimes spend a couple hours trying to figure out what a lichen is from a photograph, and only end up frustrated.
Daniel- I'm glad you pointed out the need for extreme caution before eating any wild mushroom.The one toxic "look-alike" for M. rachodes would be Chlorophyllum molybdites, sometimes known as the "green-spored parasol." It has a similar overall apprearance to the shaggy parasol, but the cap is usually not as scaly. Taking a spore print helps differentiate them better: the green-spored parasol lives up to its name and supplies a greenish spore print (unusual for a mushroom), while the shaggy parasol gives a white spore print. Another way to distinguish the two is to bruise or rub the stem flesh...the shaggy's stem typically stains brownish. As far as I know, the green-spored parasol has not been found in the Pacific NW, however, it is common in other parts of the country.
An addendum- by "country," I mean the USA. I'm not sure if C. molybdites is found in Canada anywhere.
I second the need for extreme caution in eating mushrooms. Before we ever eat a new mushroom, we key it out, do spore prints, check several specimens of different ages to be sure of the features. If the green spored parasol was a Pacific Northwest species, we probably would not have taken the leap into eating shaggy parasols. The first time we ate them, we ate just a small amount, to be sure we did not react badly. Now, we look forward each year to their appearance. But there are still many NW mushrooms that may be edible, but have poisonous lookalikes, that we avoid.
Terry, aka silver_creek
A caution about common names. M. rachodes is called The Shaggy Lepiota in my field guide (The New Savory Wild Mushroom, Margaret McKenny and Daniel E Stuntz). This guide concerns itself primarily with common edible PNW mushrooms and poisonous lookalikes. I think The Shaggy Parasol is called M. procera. I was under the impression that M. procera did not grow in N. America. Perhaps someone knows?
Gorgeous, both the mushroom and the photo. The shades of brown and gold in this dappled-sunlight forest setting are just lovely.
The Mykoweb page is either gone or moved now. After hunting around a bit, I get the impression the taxonomy has changed again in the past few years.