posted 11 years ago
I think i may have come up with an appropriate analogy here.
If i were to go hiking in the jungle, take a picture of a wild fruit and ask "is this edible?" how likely is it that someone will be able to recognize it and suggest I consume it?
Now lets pretend that the photograph i took was: black-and-white, blurry, did not include the bush or tree that it grew from and included almost no defining characteristics whatsoever. How likely is it that someone can tell me definitively if this fruit will kill me or not?
To safely identify a mushroom and thus tell you whether or not is is hallucinogenic or not (or even whether or not you will die from eating it) one has to note some defining characteristics such as: cap and stem shape, cap and stem color, cap and stem texture, gill spacing, shape and color, spore print color, habitat, time of the year, smell if any, size, what color it bruises, how brittle, soft or pliable the stem is, whether or not there is a hint of a veil, whether or not hte stem is hollow, whether or not there are rhizomorphs present, etc. As you can see, mushroom identification is much more complicated than "it kinda looks like a _____ mushroom".
Maybe i'm beating a dead horse at this point, but don't eat it!
Central Taiwan. Pan-tropical Growing zone 10A?