Von Thomas Koch
In Germany, several people have recently fallen seriously ill with mushroom poisoning. The problem: the death cap. It looks similar to edible mushrooms, so there is a high risk of mistaking it for one.
As keen mushroom hunters, my wife and I were recently out in the woods – near La Esperanza in the north of Tenerife. We didn’t find the porcini mushrooms we’d been hoping for, but we did find plenty of field mushrooms.
We hadn’t expected that, in the Canary Islands, the field mushroom would grow not in a meadow but right in the middle of a pine forest. The mushrooms sprang up like the proverbial mushrooms.
Also in the Canary Islands: be careful with unfamiliar mushrooms!
Back in my old home of Bavaria, I’ve always been very careful and only picked mushrooms that I could identify with absolute certainty. In the Canary Islands, I’m doubly cautious and was amazed to find any ’native‘ mushrooms at all.
Once our basket was full, we carried on our hunt anyway. ‚Perhaps we’ll find some porcini after all,‘ we thought. That wasn’t to be, but just about a hundred metres from where we’d found the button mushrooms, we came across another mushroom with a light-coloured cap – a real beauty, in fact.
Warning: death cap mushrooms are also found in the Canary Islands!
But what we found was a highly poisonous death cap (Amanita phalloides). My identification guide confirmed this too. Viewed from above, the caps of both mushrooms look almost identical, and, unfortunately, both species seem to inhabit the same habitat.
For reasons of liability, I would prefer not to mention the distinguishing features between the two mushrooms. However, there are some good apps and, of course, various books that work perfectly well offline too.
Editor’s note: Just a few weeks ago, four people in Germany were admitted to Essen University Hospital after accidentally ingesting death cap mushrooms. Two children and one adult required a liver transplant. The liver of the fourth patient, a five-year-old boy, appears to be recovering on its own. Nevertheless, he too requires intensive care.
Eating death cap mushrooms is life-threatening for humans. For this reason, mushrooms you have picked yourself should only be served if they are definitely edible.
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