Destroying Angel

Destroying angel is a collective term for the white, deadly Amanitas. Their history in this country is something of a soap opera, or a comedy of errors, and is fairly important, since they are our most common deadly species.

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The archetypal destroying angel is Amanita verna. This is a European species, first given its current name by Bulliard and then validated by both Persoon and Fries, who listed it as the very first mushroom in his Systema mycologicum (p.15):

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A. vernus, cap slightly scaly, margin smooth; stem stuffed, more or less equal; volva free, saccate

White, odor unpleasant. Stem 3-6 unc. long, 4 lin. wide, splitting at the ends. Cap ovate when young, becoming smooth and somewhat depressed, the margin becoming somewhat wavy and uplifted, 2 4 unc. Wide. Gills lanceolate.
In woods, solitary in humus, frequent. Spring and summer.

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A much shorter description than the ones we use nowadays, and a much less precise one (I should mention here that in all the examples I'm reproducing here, I haven't the faintest idea what their unit of measurement is. This was long before the metric system.). And he doesn't need much precision: the only other whitish Amanita that he lists is Amanita ovoidea, which has the shape you would expect, a striate margin, and a very loose volva. (I have no idea what species this is, by the way, or even if it has survived to the present day. My best guess is that it's an albino Amanita caesarea-type thing, since Fries calls it delicious.) In any case, Amanita verna became the default destroying angel, and any white, gracile Amanitas were referred to this name.

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The party was ruined about the turn of the century, when people began paying more attention to microscopic features and some smartass noticed that the spores of our american destroying angels were round, whereas the spores of Amanita verna were ovoid. Naturally, you can imagine how upset everyone was, and what a ruckus this caused. The search went out for a white Amanita with round spores, and one was soon found: in 1833, Louis Secretan had published his Mycographie Suisse, which included the white Amanita virosa, which had round spores. Rejoicing filled the land, and our most common white deadly Amanitas have been called Amanita virosa ever since.

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But all was not as well as it seemed. For although Amanita virosa had the right sort of spores, it was clearly a different sort of mushroom than our american destroying angel. It was an alpine species (first described from Switzerland) with a shaggy stem and sticky cap. Secretan's original description runs:

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6. Am. Vénéneuse
Am. virosa

Var. A - - Bulliard, pl. 577, fig. H. A. bulbeux?
Bolton Hist. Fung. tabl. 48 A. vernalis. Pileo glutinoso

Image of Amanita virosa from Mordecai Cubitt Cooke (1857 - 1879) Mycographia, seu Icones fungorum

Cap White; the center becoming greyish black in age; moist, viscid. It is covered, in youth, with debris from the volva; at first conic-ovoid, then convex-plane, the center becoming somewhat depressed; finally, the margin develops very short striations.
Diameter 2 1/2 p. to 4 p.; flesh white, 2 1/2 l. thick.

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Gills White, moderately numerous, soft, attached, 3 l., 3 demi-f. broad

Stem Completely white; 5 p. long, 9 l. wide, often much smaller; curved, thinner at the top, swelling by imperceptible degrees to the bottom. The membrane that encloses the upper stalk is covered with fine striations, of which each one corresponds to a gill; it is a white cottony mat; its edges form a ring 7 l. wide, fringed and torn at the edges. Above the ring (I think he means below), the stem is covered with plush pieces more or less large and well-marked; the base is often curved; the bulb is not very pronounced. The white volva, 2 p. high and 9 l. wide, has a very angular edge; the scent is strong, virulent, of radish. This amanita grows singly under oaks, at the beginning of August. (As found in Sauvabelin)

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Var. B - - It grows under first; the dimensions are all larger. The cap is covered with a few small warts. In the same season. (As found in Landoup)

Observations:To me it seems that this is a separate species, which one distinguishes from Amanita verna essentially by the attached gills, and from Amanita bulbosa by the thickness of its stalk, by its greater diameter; and, in both cases, by the patches on the stalk and the viscosity of the cap.

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Indeed, Secretan's Amanita virosa is also distinguished from the american destroying angels "by the patches on the stalk and the viscosity of the cap." And I wonder, from his description, whether he named it "virosa" after the scent, rather than after the poison (which is what everyone seems to assume). Obviously, when american mycologists started calling our most common american destroying angel by this name, they were ignoring some crucial aspects of Secretan's description (and of Cooke's drawing. In the 1990s, some american mycologists started checking the original description of Amanita virosa, and they came to the conclusion that the turn-of-the-century mycologists must have been smoking something funny when they decided to start using that name.

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But all was not lost! George Francis Atkinson (probably one of the people who started using the name Amanita virosa) had declared the species Amanita bisporigera. This was a mushroom that looked just like Amanita virosa/verna, but had only two spores per basidium. As the years went by, the separation between Amanita bisporigera and Amanita virosa/verna came under fire: people started finding mushrooms that had both 2- and 4-spored basidia; others did studies and found that a gill sample from a destroying angel had all or mostly 2-spored basidia when it was young, but as it matured, the basidia became 4-spored. What this means is that we now have a correct (well, correctly generated, anyway) name for our most common american destroying angel, even though it was created for a taxon that was incorrectly segregated from that destroying angel. In other words, because the 2-spored and 4-spored mushroom are probably the same thing, they will both end up being called Amanita bisporigera

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Okay, so why am I using words like "probably", and "will end up being called" in the last paragraph? Such phrases make people nervous when they just want a happy ending and a stable name to use on their mushrooms. Well, none of that has been officially settled yet. It's coming soon. There's a graduate student at Michigan State who's working on the DNA of all the Phalloideae; and once she gets finished, that should settle these issues.

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Image of Amanita virosa from Verne Ovid Graham (1933) Mushrooms of the Chicago region in Program of the Activities of the Chicago Academy of Sciences

In the meantime, we can do a little speculation of our own. For instance, is the "real" Amanita virosa present in the United States? Verne Ovid Graham's (1944) Mushrooms of the Great Lakes Region includes the species with a picture that is clearly the European virosa. Did he actually find it here? Graham's collections are in the Field Museum, so one day when I have just that extra special bit of free time, I can go down there and root through their holdings and try to find out. On the other hand, Amanita virosa is supposed to stick close to its mountainous habitat, only rarely occuring elsewhere. For instance, Cooke's painting of it was made from the one time he ever found it, in his ~60 years of collecting and identifying fungi. The jury is out. And then there's the equally intriguing question of whether Amanita bisporigera occurs in Europe.

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Image of Amanita virosa from Verne Ovid Graham (1933) Mushrooms of the Chicago region in Program of the Activities of the Chicago Academy of Sciences

You can see a good contemporary photograph of the real Amanita virosa at http://www.cx.sakura.ne.jp/~kinoko/01eng/amanita_virosa.htm.

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