Cap 5 to 30 cm, red with white pyramidal warts that wash off with rain; white free gills, a skirt-like ring and a bulb ringed with veil remnants.
- Size
- Cap 5 to 30 cm across, on a stipe 5 to 20 cm tall.
- Toxicity
- Poisonous. Its ibotenic acid turns into muscimol in the body; poisoning is rarely fatal, but it is not a mushroom to eat.
- Where it grows
- Under pine, oak, spruce, fir, birch and cedar, in the temperate and boreal forests of the Northern Hemisphere.
- Look-alikes
- Caesar's mushroom (Amanita caesarea), orange red and without warts. Rain can wash the warts off a fly agaric too.
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- Family
- Amanitaceae
- Order
- Agaricales
- Ecology
- Ectomycorrhizal: it wraps the roots of its tree and trades water and minerals for sugars.
- Spores
- White print; spores 9 to 13 by 6.5 to 9 µm, not amyloid.
- Chemistry
- Ibotenic acid, a prodrug of muscimol, the compound behind its effects. Parboiling lowers its toxicity.
- Range
- Native to the Northern Hemisphere; carried south with pine plantations, it is now a weed in New Zealand, Tasmania and Victoria.
Commonly associated with
- Fairy tales
- Siberian shamanism
- Video games
In folklore
In a Koryak story from Siberia, the god Existence spat on the earth: his spittle became the fly agaric and his saliva its warts, and Raven, exhilarated by it, told it to grow forever so that people could learn from it. Siberian peoples used it in rituals. A link with Santa Claus is popular but disputed by Sámi scholars. It is the mushroom of fairy-tale illustrations, of Fantasia (1940) and of Super Mario.
Curious fact
Its name is a recipe: Albertus Magnus wrote before 1256 that, sprinkled in milk, it kills flies.
Folklore and traditional associations. They vary between sources and are beliefs, not scientific claims.