[Nadya]

Not a biologist, but a fan of flora! He's correct. Maybe not the best comparison, but mushrooms are a lot like snakes. [0] Fact of the matter is, if I saw a snake with any variation of red, black, and yellow I'd be sure to keep my distance. To quote the article:

>Though there is no harm in assuming all colorful snakes are dangerous

I assume all wild mushrooms are dangerous. There is no harm in it. :)

[0] http://www.wildlife-removal.com/snakecolorrhyme.html

[maxerickson]

I think it is wise to set a very high bar, but having a moderate amount of experience picking morels, I can trivially tell when I have a real morel or a false one (there are several species of edible morels and several species of confounding mushrooms involved).

[Nadya]

I'll have to take your word for trivially telling them apart. To my untrained eye, I wouldn't be able to tell the dangerous species of my region apart from the safe ones.

But looking at the math, the most fatal species belong to Amanita [0]. Amanita contains about 600 varieties (wiki lists 500ish). Of those 500, for my region only, I would need to learn how to identify about 30 varieties. A reasonably feasible amount! But wait... we can trim that number down some more. Ignoring the ones where edibility is unknown, that leaves only 10 or so to identify. Anyone who cared enough could likely easily learn to tell them apart. But with 5 being known as deadly and 1 of those being the angel of death [1], I won't be taking any chances. :)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Amanita_species

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amanita_ocreata

[maxerickson]

So go hunt morels after a forest fire. You won't confuse them with the destroying angel. The advice to start with someone who knows the difference among the species that might be confused with morels would still be good to follow.

It's also totally fine to not do anything, I just wanted to point out that your position was extremely conservative on the matter.