Amidella     Section

This is a key to gilled mushrooms, that is, mushrooms having a definite cap with a fertile surface consisting of gills. The fruiting body usually also has a stem, although that may be lateral or absent (usually, then, the mushroom is growing from wood). You can use this key to identify mushrooms that you find.

Fruiting body containing fibers (usually in the stalk)

Fruiting body having a combination of some of the following characteristics:
Stalk growing out of a cup of cottony tissue called a volva (all white-spored mushrooms with a volva go here)
Cap with scattered patches or flakes of the same sort of tissue as the volva (see second picture), easily peeled off
Annulus (skirt-like ring on stalk)

Diagnosis

• Annulus almost always absent
  
• Volva present, saccate
  
• Cap margin not striate, or striate only right at the margin
  
• When they're young, the colored universal veil material on the cap always seems crusty to me (the brown stuff here), rather than flaky

• Stalk flaky at first - - that's why there's no annulus: it's all just a big mass of flakes. You can vaguely see where the annulus belongs here, though
  
• Oh, yeah! And often with an appendiculate margin!

Microscropic Characters

• Spores amyloid

Comments

Narrow down your identification:

Entire fruiting body white, except for
Universal veil material, which is pale pink

Cap up to 2" across, often with brown fibrils
Volva small, thick

Cap usually more than 3" across; white, sometimes aging or bruising brownish
Universal veil material white

Larger and more gracile than the other species in this section
Cap dark brown

Glossary

Mushrooms

People

Newsletter

Events