Many people associate the autumn season with the time of mushroom picking, although numerous varieties of these mysterious creatures can not only be found, but also collected for culinary purposes almost all year round. Now for most of the most commonly used mushrooms, the season is ending – in many regions there were frosts, and somewhere snow is already confidently lying.
Last year, summer residents told a lot of interesting stories about mushrooms, and more recently actively boasted about the mushroom harvest. But this article is not about porcini mushrooms.
Pale death
Pale toadstool (Latin Amanita phalloides) – a mushroom from the genus of fly agarics, deadly poisonous – its use is often fatal.
The Roman Emperor Tiberius Claudius is said to have been poisoned by a mushroom dish that was made from green toadstool, a pale toadstool, on the orders of his wife Agrippina.
The Emperor, who suffered from a poisonous mushroom, is not alone: legends say that the ancient Greek playwright Euripides was also poisoned by pale toadstools. And Pope Clement VII, one of the four Popes of the Medici family. About ordinary citizens who “played in the box” from eating this mushroom, history is silent.
According to modern statistics, every fourth child and every twentieth adult dies from the poison of the pale toadstool. Only about 30 grams of pulp – about a quarter of the normal size of Amanita phalloides-can be fatal. The toxicity depends on the region of growth, as well as on the weather – the number of rainy and Sunny days.
The poisons of the pale toadstool-amanitins, phalloidins and amanin-produce hepatonephrotoxic (on the liver and kidneys) effects and are not destroyed by any heat treatment. In total, scientists have isolated about a dozen different toxins from Amanita phalloides, and the effect of many of them on the human body is still far from fully understood.
But the main danger of the pale toadstool is its treachery. After all, you will feel the poisoning of almost all poisonous or improperly prepared mushrooms immediately, perhaps even before finishing the feast or dinner: the body will immediately try to get rid of toxins through severe vomiting and diarrhea.
When poisoning with pale toadstool, symptoms appear only a few hours (and sometimes even days) later, when gastric lavage is no longer useful, and the poisons have done their dirty work. Then, on the second or third day after the onset of symptoms (indomitable vomiting and diarrhea), patients experience a period of “false well-being”, during which irreversible destructive changes occur in the kidneys and liver. Therefore, it is extremely important to go to the hospital immediately, at the first suspicion of poisoning, without hoping to “lie down”.
Another way to avoid accidental poisoning is to grow mushrooms.
Say a word about the pale toadstool
It turns out that the mushroom, which is so dangerous, itself needs protection.
The pale grebe is classified as a rare species (i.e. not directly threatened with extinction, but preserved in small numbers or in limited territories).
The main reason for the danger of extinction of these fungi is human activity: deforestation leads to the death of mycelium. However, it is quite possible that a significant decrease in the population of the pale grebe is due not only to industrial and industrial reasons, but also, so to speak, moral.
Often in the forest you can see mercilessly trampled mushrooms, as if the beautiful fly agaric, pale toadstools and other representatives of the inedible and poisonous mushroom brotherhood are able to attack the mushroom picker and bite him. Meanwhile, mushrooms that are not interesting to humans can serve as food or medicine for other forest inhabitants. Many fungi form mycorrhizae with plants and are an important link in the life of the biocenosis.
Pale toadstool, according to some mushroom pickers, deserves not just a kick, but total destruction. There is an opinion, and it is actively promoted on some sites dedicated to mushrooms, that the found representative of Amanita phalloides should not just be ruthlessly trampled: “experts” advise digging around the soil in a diameter of at least 1.5 meters to destroy the mycelium.
In order not to suffer from the poison of the pale toadstool or other mushrooms, just be careful in the forest, do not collect unfamiliar and controversial mushrooms, and do not destroy them. Take care of yourself, but also take care of your surroundings, because “there is nothing useless in nature” (M. Montaigne).
Leave a Reply