[alecst]

> Nicholas - We had this family doctor came around and we knew pretty well actually what they were. I mean, we looked in the book the very next morning when Alastair started feeling ill and Charlotte was already ill. It was so clear from the photograph that what we had eaten, it wasn't a cep. It was themushroom called cortinarius speciosissimus which some people call the deadly webcap apparently. It had a rather comforting skull and cross bones underneath it, with a little caption, deadly poisonous.

https://www.thenakedscientists.com/articles/interviews/nicho...

I feel bad for the guy -- really, so, so bad -- but you have to be really confused to mix up a bolete with a webcap.

Webcap: https://www.first-nature.com/fungi/images/cortinariales/cort...

Porcino: https://lovelygreens.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/cep-porc...

Porcini don't have gills! This is like mushrooms 101.

Doesn't this kind of prove the rule? I feel like most of the cases of people getting sick from mushrooms are cases like this.

[floatingatoll]

Any time someone says "this is xyz 101, how could anyone be so confused", I hear instead "the human capacity for doing something without what others view as 'minimum sufficient education to survive it' remains unchanged throughout human history", which is precisely why the warnings are so dire. It's not to scare people away, it's just to offer them a defense versus their own curiosity and impulsiveness until they choose to make time to learn xyz 101.

[alecst]

I guess... I mean, it is more mysterious than you suggest, given that this fellow had been foraging for 10 years apparently.

It's like a driver mixing up the gas and the brake pedal. I don't really have an explanation.

[floatingatoll]

Ah! That sounds like a job for an NTSB-type analysis, because most human WTFs are built on a series of improbable events.

Maybe their glasses were fogged? Maybe the afternoon light was at the right angle to hide the 'gills' enough that their check failed? Maybe they had a time-efficient shortcut that finally found an edge case they hadn't planned for?

[Alex3917]

Right, of people who die from mushroom poisoning, they are almost all either immigrants eating things that look like edible mushrooms where they come from, or else children who are randomly eating things they see in their lawn. Cases like this where you have someone who has been foraging for decades and eats something deadly poisonous happen maybe once every ten years, and I suspect it's mostly people with early onset Parkinson's or something that's causing them to act impulsively. This isn't an identification mistake, there's clearly some kind of neurological issue here.