Apologies to anyone still seeing duplicates of this post, programming.dev was running slow when I tried to post it and Jeroba was giving me timeout errors so I retried a few times 😅.
Here's a chart from the Pacific Northwest. Only the top left quarter are actual pine cones but if you asked someone here what a "regular pinecone" is, they'd probably pick the Douglas fir cone (though TBF, "what kind of tree is a Douglas fir?" mystified science for decades).
It's pretty simple to gain the knowledge, learn an edible species, learn the lookalikes, and maybe take them to a local mycology club and ask for an ID confirmation the first few times to make sure.
If you avoid little brown mushrooms and pure white mushrooms, know what a deathcap looks like, and don't spend years eating Paxillus involutus without ever looking it up, then you're not going to end up eating any deadly or psychedelic species.
There are a few deadly Corts but those tend to be reddish instead of purple. Corts are very under-studied in general so there are are many with absolutely zero info about them (usually because they're nearly identical to several others) and the deadly ones have a delay before they destroy your kidneys so it's generally not a good idea to even try.
Inocybe are generally "days of your body attempting to purge out of every orifice" poisonous which usually won't kill you unless you become too dehydrated.
Luckily, this is one of the ones that's obvious from this angle. Also "growing in a potted plant" is a really useful piece of information for mushroom identification because it narrows down common possibilities a ton.
These are actually called "flowerpot parasols", complex Leucocoprinus brebissonii. They're a harmless saprophyte originally from the tropics, they love orchid bark, a common component of potting soil, which is why they show up in flowerpots so often.
Nah, they're morally grey/bad in Eyes of Wakanda. The point of the show is to explore how messed up their isolationism was. That's why the last episode is about
a time Traveller making sure that Killmonger spurs T'challa to finally end their isolationist policy so they don't doom themselves and the world.
Ah we have those here too, they're pretty widespread.
Taking a spore print is a surefire way to tell them apart: cut off a cap and put it on a piece of foil, then put a cup over it. After a few hours you'll either have white spores (Armillaria) or brown spores (Galerina).
IMO Galerina Marginata don't really look much like honey mushrooms once you're familiar with them. Honey mushrooms have scales on the stem and sometimes the cap depending on the species which Galerina never have. Galerina also tend to be smaller with insubstantial cap flesh and thinner stems. Both grow in clusters but Galerina grows in smaller clusters of 3-5 vs 10 or more.
Likely H. capnoides, checking the button for green gills would have told you for sure. You can also spit test to differentiate them (H. fasciculare is bitter).
Apologies to anyone still seeing duplicates of this post, programming.dev was running slow when I tried to post it and Jeroba was giving me timeout errors so I retried a few times 😅.