Death Cap
Can killAmanita phalloides
The death cap is responsible for the majority of fatal mushroom poisonings worldwide. It is not rare, it grows in ordinary parks and gardens under oaks, and it is regularly mistaken for edible species by people who grew up eating similar-looking mushrooms elsewhere. Amatoxin poisoning has a characteristic and dangerous pattern: violent symptoms after six to twelve hours, an apparent recovery over the next day, and then liver failure.
Read this before anything else
- Never eat a wild mushroom identified by a website or an app.That includes this one. These tools narrow possibilities; they cannot see your mushroom, its base, its smell or its habitat, and the difference between a meal and a liver transplant is sometimes a feature buried in the soil.
- Get it confirmed in person by an experienced local forager or a mycological society. Most regions have one, most run free identification sessions, and they will look at the actual specimen.
- Dig, do not pull. The cup at the base of a death cap is often underground. Pulling the mushroom leaves the most important feature in the soil.
- If someone has eaten a wild mushroom and feels unwell, call poison control now — in the US, 1-800-222-1222. Do not wait for symptoms to worsen. Amatoxin poisoning has a false recovery phase, and delayed treatment is what makes it fatal. Save any uneaten pieces for identification.
Quick facts
- If eaten
- Deadly. A single cap can kill an adult. The apparent recovery phase after the first day is the most dangerous part, because it delays treatment while liver damage continues. Any suspected ingestion is an emergency — call poison control immediately and do not wait for symptoms.
- Under the cap
- gills
- Spore print
- white
- Cap
- Smooth, slightly greasy when damp, typically olive-green to yellowish-green but sometimes pale brown or almost white. Usually free of warts, with faint radial fibres.
- Stem
- White, with a soft skirt-like ring hanging near the top and — critically — a membranous sac at the base. That sac is often buried, so the mushroom must be dug up rather than picked to see it.
- Growing on
- soil, hardwood litter
- Season
- Late summer through autumn, occasionally into winter in mild regions.
How to identify it
- White spore print, white gills that stay white, and a white stem.
- Membranous cup (volva) at the stem base. Dig the whole mushroom up — pulling it snaps the base off and loses the single most important feature.
- Skirt-like ring near the top of the stem.
- Growing from soil near oak and other hardwoods, never on wood.
What it is confused with
One test settles each of these.
Volvariella has a pink spore print and no ring. The death cap has a white print and a ring. This confusion causes deaths every year.
Cut any small white ball in half top to bottom. A puffball is uniformly white inside; an Amanita egg shows the outline of a developing mushroom.
Agaricus has pink gills maturing to chocolate brown and a brown spore print. Death cap gills stay white.