One mushroom can feed an entire village! (5 photos)

I don’t know about you, but Mexican mushroom pickers seem miserable to me. Well, what kind of “silent hunt” is this when the main difficulty is not to find the mushroom, but to bring it home? And besides, I went mushroom picking once, and that’s it—you don’t have to go for the whole year.





So, friends, allow me to introduce our guest today, for some (who likes to pick mushrooms for the sake of excitement) sadness, and for others (who care about the result expressed in the mass of collected mushrooms) joy.

The scientific name of this mushroom is Macrocybe titans, which can be translated from Latin as “titanic bighead.” And it is completely justified, since the size of this mushroom is amazing.



But even more amazing is the ability of this mushroom to hide, given its size, it is surprising to learn that it was discovered and described only in 1998. Although it is not found in distant impassable places, but in rather densely populated ones. However, it is also found in distant places.

This mushroom is native to Central and South America. And the northern border of its range extends to the United States, where it was first discovered.





These mushroom giants usually grow in clusters, and given their size (an individual mushroom can exceed a meter in circumference of the cap), it is far from certain that you will be able to take home your find.

In the literature, by the way, they write that the mass of the cluster can exceed thirty kilograms. And this is already quite a heavy burden, especially if you walk far from the forest



As for their edibility and whether they are worth bringing home at all. The literature reports that the mushrooms are edible and local residents cook them. I suppose that if they were poisonous, then the whole village would die out from one mushroom (and this is difficult not to notice).

True, until the fruiting bodies have reached their impressive size, they can be confused with a local poisonous species, so you need to collect those that have reached trophy size