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WARNING: I lick a mushroom in this video. It is largely unnecessary to lick mushrooms in order to ID them.
In this video, I talk about how to find and identify Clitocybe nuda, a common edible mushroom known as the blewit. Blewits have lovely purple gills, with tones of lilac and tan on the cap and a faintly streaky/furry stem.
Blewits are decomposers, and most specimens have a big clump of mycelium and leaves all tangled together at the base of the stem. In addition to my blewits, I share a parasol mushroom in the Macrolepiota genus and discuss the life styles of these fungi. Both are secondary decomposers, meaning that they grow on the forest floor and consume leaf litter and other organic matter that's pretty far along its journey to becoming soil.
Next, I share two lookalikes for Clitocybe nuda: Cortinarius iodes and Lactarius indigo group. Cortinarius iodes, commonly called the viscid purple cort, is a slimy, rusty-gilled mushroom with a cap that ranges from dingy tan to purple and a brown webby ring on the stem. Cortinarius iodes ostensibly can be told apart from a similar species, Cortinarius iodeoides, the flavor of the viscid snot on the cap. In a bold move, I try to pronounce the name Cortinarius iodeoides and proceed to lick my specimen. I usually don't lick mushrooms to identify them, but evidently that's the best way to field test purple slimy corts, so here we are.
Finally, I share a fine sample of the radically blue and goofy-looking Lactarius indigo group. Although it's pretty far-fetched to call this edible mushroom a lookalike for Clitocybe nuda, I really fancy blue mushrooms and couldn't resist highlighting it.