There are over a hundred thousand mushroom species in the world, ranging from parasitic to medicinal to choice edible to deadly poisonous. Might not be such a good idea to eat the nearest mushroom you see… Thus, the reason why mushroom identification books are widely used around the world. Some books focus on only medicinal or edible mushrooms, while others give a wide range of species, including toxic or harmful types. In this blog post, I’ll share how I identify mushrooms.
There are a series of mushroom identification books, pamplets, and other resources that are available. I look for books that are based in North America, Canada, or even better, British Columbia. Since there are such a wide variety of mushrooms I prefer books that cover all areas (edibility, medicinal properties, toxicity, etc.).
Find your specimen – it could be a mushroom you wish to eat, use medicinally, or just identify.
When you find a mushroom that you want to identify, one method is to take a spore print. As far as I know, this only works on stalked mushrooms (mushrooms with a cap and a stalk, like the one in the image above).
To take a spore print, remove the stalk from the mushroom and place the cap face down on a sheet of paper.
After the mushroom is face down on the paper, place a jar or cup on top, and leave the mushroom overnight.
The next day, remove the jar and the mushroom cap, and voilà – a beautiful spore print is at your fingertips!
The spores in a mushroom can be white, brown, black, or even purple-ish. Spore colours are used to help identify a mushroom, and mushrooms are often divided into spore colours in identifying books. This narrows the search down even a small amount, and may help in the end.
The spore print is cool! It’s like looking at the rings of a tree.
Totally! I love examining the spore prints left from mushrooms – they’re so interesting to look at.
According to one source (InfoBloom.com) there are around 75,000 identified species of fungi, with an estimation of a million of species yet to be discovered! “As differing species may look the same superficially, classifying them accurately is difficult, and usually requires the application of molecular tools such as DNA sequencing. As DNA sequencing is still relatively expensive, even for fungi with genomes far shorter than mammals, it will likely be many decades before the majority are classified with certainty.” (InfoBloom.com 2021). My questions are have you discovered any mushrooms you can’t find a matching ID? Also I understand the mushroom is the fruit of the fungi, which makes me wonder, do you know the number of mushroom species that have been identified?
Thanks for the info! Even though I’ve been interested in mushrooms for little over a year now, there’s still so much that I haven’t learned, and I appreciate every bit of information I get my hands on. To answer your first question, I usually only identify mushrooms that are radically different than that of your ordinary ones (for example, I don’t even try to ID LMBs ((little brown mushrooms)), because there are so many types that it’s not even worth the effort, in my opinion). There are times where the mushroom I want to identify does not appear in mushroom sources, but usually that is because the books are narrowed down to “mushrooms of North America” or “edible/medicinal” or such. And they don’t cover every single species of mushroom, only the commonly found or more popular ones. I wouldn’t say that I’ve happened upon an unclassified mushroom, but you never know.
Please ignore my second question, as your post already answers that question. Also the following website may be a good resource to keep up with new species being discovered. https://www.mushroom.world/home/index
Thanks for the website!