It's really fucking suspicious that mushrooms evolved mechanisms to produce serotonin.

But it helps when you remember that a mushroom is the fruit of a (usually) much larger organism. Then you can start applying normal fruit rules. Some want to be eaten, or picked up and moved around. Some want to keep insects from infesting the fruit. Others don't give a damn and release spores into the wind or water.

Also remember that nicotine is an insecticide. Insects that nibble on tobacco die, which prevents infestation at scale. (Un?)fortunately it's also neuroactive in apes, so we farm incredible quantities of tobacco to extract its poisons.

There is no logic in evolution at large scales. Things happen, sometimes there's fourth order effects like some oddball internal hormone causing wild hallucinations in apes. It's all random optimization for small scale problems that ripple out to unintended large scale consequences.

Two things:

0) Humans (and even our recent ancestors) eating you are a very recent thing to be concerned about, numbers-wise. By the time our numbers were enough to provide evolutionary pressure, we started farming what we wanted, which kinda breaks the process. Also. most poisons don't effect everything equally, so what might prevent a horse from eating you might taste delicious to us (like the nightshade family) or even be sought after for other reasons, like capsaicin.

1) You're succumbing to the usual evolution fallacy. Evolution doesn't want anything more than 1 and 1 want to be 2. It's just a process, and sometimes (hell maybe even often) it doesn't work in a linear fashion. Lots of "X steps back, Y steps forward", and oftentimes each of those steps can take anything from decades to centuries or more to make, and by the time it happens what was pressuring that change is gone.

So many people, even when they obviously know better, like to think of evolution as intelligent. It's obviously not. But every time someone says stuff like this, it reinforces the fallacy and then we get people saying things like "if evolution is real, why come $insane_argument_against_evolution?"

Many good answers, but I'll add another angle I don't see any replies covering, which is that being poisonous/toxic is expensive. We humans lead charmed lives by the standards of the biosphere, where we get obese, and even before we got obese, many of us had unbelievable access to nutrients and energy. The steady state of the ecosystem is a war where every calorie must be spent carefully. This is particularly clear in the bacterial world but it progresses up to macroscopic plant life as well. Producing poisons is energy you could be using to grow or reproduce. Some poisons require additional care because they're still poisonous to the producer, it's just that the producer spends additional resources on containing the poison so it doesn't affect them.

There is a constant, low-level evolutionary impetus to stop spending any calorie that doesn't need to be spent, which would generally include the production of poisons of any kind. This low-level impetus is clearly something that can be overcome in many situations, but it is nevertheless always there, always the "temptation" to stop spending so much on poisons and redirect it to growth or reproduction. Over time it's a winning play quite often.

The fly agaric, is very poisonous and has a very distinctive red with white dots pattern to warn about its poison. Unfortunately, that pattern looks so pretty that disney and ninetendo decided to use it as their generic mushroom coloring. So, if you are hiking with your kids, and they see a pretty mushroom just like in cartoons, don't let them touch it.

If there are enough poisonous mushrooms, it is possible that most animals decide to leave mushrooms alone regardless of distinctive coloring. That seems to be the case because mushrooms tend not to be bitten by large animals, at least when i go mushrooming. If that happens, it is possible that other mushrooms do not develop poison but rather freeload on the poison of other mushrooms.

Thus, one may guess, that first distinctive poisonous mushrooms like the fly agaric developed, then most animals large enough to eat them developed an instinct to avoid all mushrooms, and then the non-poisonous freeloading mushrooms developed.

There are some psychedelic mushrooms in the amazon that use their psychedelic effect to zombify ants and force them to spread the mushrooms spores. That is really disturbing, find a youtube video of it if you feel like having some nightmares.

Furthermore it should be noted that the poison or the psychedelic effect may not even be relevant for evolution. The poisonous or psychedelic compound may be produced for completely different purpose or as a byproduct of the production of another useful compound.

Its the same evolutionary patterns that plants went through.

Most mushrooms are edible because their spores can pass through the digestive system of most animals, thus allowing them to spread.

Other mushrooms developed toxins to protect their fruiting bodies - often the biggest threat isn't larger animals, but insects. Toxins that are neurotoxic to insect nervous systems, happen to cause mostly "harmless" psychedelic trips to our brains. Other toxin mechanisms happen to be deadly to both insects and humans.

As proof of this evolutionary arms race, there are fruit flies that have developed resistance to amatoxins.

I've watched a documentary on mushrooms. Their posion is not a defense mechanism in most (all? don't remember) cases. It is just a consequence of the fact that mushrooms need to dump the excess Nitrogen somewhere, and that is related to the fact that most posionous mushrooms are those who thrive in Nitrogen-rich environments, like a leaf forest floor. And unfortunately for us, Nitrogen is a component for many creative biologically active substances. FWIW, human is the best mushroom's friend, when you cut it and carry around you seed tons of spores, so as a sibling comment said, mushrooms would not need to develop anti-human defenses. It's just that some of them got (un)lucky when played the chemical roulette while trying to figure out how to get rid of Nitrogen waste.

> What do mushrooms want?

I think it's a way of mushrooms saying "We don't think of you at all."

Natural selection cuts both ways.

Sure, many things evolved to be less edible. But humans themselves are hunter-gatherer omnivores - who evolved to be very good at eating a lot of very different things. There are adaptations in play on both ends.

There are, in fact, many countermeasures that would deter other animals, but fail to deter humans. In part due to some liver adaptations, in part due to sheer body mass, and in part due to human-specific tricks like using heat to cook food.

If your countermeasures just so happen to get denaturated by being heated to 75C, good luck getting humans with them. It's why a lot of grains or legumes are edible once cooked but inedible raw. The same is true for many "mildly poisonous" mushrooms - they lose their toxicity if cooked properly.

Those countermeasures don't have to be lethal to deter consumption! If something causes pain, diarrhea or indigestion, or some weirder effects, or just can't be spotted or reached easily, that can work well enough. So the evolutionary pressure to always go for highly lethal defenses isn't there. It's just one pathway to take, out of many, and evolution will roll with whatever happens to work best at the moment.

Human takeover of the biosphere is a recent event too, and humans are still an out-of-distribution threat to a lot of things. So you get all of those weird situations - where sometimes, humans just blast through natural defenses without even realizing they're there, and sometimes, the defenses work but don't work very well because they evolved to counter something that's not a human, and sometimes, the defenses don't exist at all because the plant's environment never pressured it to deter consumption by large mammals at all.

And with the level of control humans attained over nature now? The ongoing selection pressure is often shaped less like "how to deter humans" and more like "how to attract humans", because humans will go out of their way to preserve and spread things they happen to like.

> And the poisonous ones apparently don't use color as a warning signal, and don't smell all that bad, and some of the poisons have really mild effects, like "gives only some people diarrhea" or "makes a hangover worse".

Some of the poisonous ones even taste really good, and don't start making you sick for a day or two (and then you die horribly). You hear about it from time to time, where people have the best dinner of their life and then are dead.

That’s also my thought. The seem to be inside some type of evolutionary gray area or dead-end, where mutations in the edibility axis do not seem to matter much for the survival of the specifies. So we end up getting species of all extremes: extremely poisonous, highly valuable for coursing, trippy, non-trippy, mildly poisonous, etc.

"one mushroom species in five is poisonous"? 20% ??? That seems like a crazy high estimate to me, at least if you mean deadly poisonous to humans. In the USA there are only a few species of amanita, galerina, a few of the hundreds of species of cortinarius, maybe some gyromitra and a handful of others I can think of that will kill you. Among the many thousands of mushroom species in the USA, there are only a few dozen known deadly poisonous ones. It's a really tiny percentage. Of course that doesn't mean that the others are edible, just not gonna kill you...

Horizontal gene transfer is looking a lot more common than we learned in biology class. Fungi have a class of proteins (Starships) which transfer hundreds of genes, beetles picked up cellulose-digesting proteins from bacteria in their digestive tract and embryos.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starship_(genetics)

Plants want to be eaten only by big animals that take them on long and random walks and then die far away from where they are picked up to fertilize the seed.

Fruit bodies are reproductive organs, spores can survive digestion, and there are plenty of species that use animal waste as a substrate.

The same logic of hard seeds applies to spores.

I dig your style, you sound like my inner monologue :D

Some are saying: "Don't come anywhere near me". Others are are saying: "Take a little, I'll show you a good time. Take too much... I will make you end your own life."

A mushroom doesn't produce seeds, it produces spores.

If you pick a mushroom the spores use you, your clothes, your pets, your horses as vectors for spreading.

I think of those "genetic algorithm car thing" simulations that run in a browser.

weird stuff survives.

and good stuff crashes and burns sometimes.

They want the same thing as every other organism wants - maximal exploitation of a niche by a lineage. Each adaptation that survives overwhelmingly tends toward advantage in the exploitation of a niche - fending off predation, establishing control over resources, symbiotic support, parasitic drain, and a myriad other capabilities that are highly environment dependent.

Just look at antelope in north america - they evolved incredible speed and agility in order to outrun and evade megafauna predators, but there's nothing left nearly fast enough to be a threat to them. Environments can change, and leave an organism with features that are no longer necessary or even beneficial in terms of overall quality of life and energy efficiency. The slightest noise can disturb a herd of antelope into bolting as if there were prairie lions or sabertooth tigers on the prowl. They don't need to be hypervigilant in the same way, and it burns a lot of calories to move the way they do, so whitetail deer and other slower species that aren't quite as reactive or fast are better at exploiting the ecosystem as it is.

With mushrooms that have mysterious chemistry, there will be a lot of those sorts of vestigial features. Extinct species of insects and animals and plants will have been the target of specific features, or they might end up in novel environments where other features are particularly suitable, but some become completely counterproductive in practice.

As far as psilocybe mushrooms go, in lower quantities, they actually provide a cognitive advantage sufficient to make a symbiotic relationship plausible between mammals and the mushrooms, albeit indirect. Animals under low levels of psilocybin influence have better spatial perception, can better spot movement in low light conditions, and there's a slight reduction in the neural influence of trauma inspired networks. Large quantities can be beneficial in a number of abstract ways. Any animal that sought those mushrooms out could thereby gain adaptive advantage over competitors that didn't partake.

Having an extremely toxic substance might be useful for killing large organisms and their decomposition either feeding the fungi directly, or feeding the organisms beneficial to the fungi. This can be plants, other fungi, or the feces of scavengers. Horizontal transfer might occur if there's an initial beneficial relationship, animals like the smell and taste of a thing, and then the fungi picks up the killing poison, and the consequences are sufficiently beneficial to outbreed the safe ones.

If too many become deadly, animals get killed off, and the non-deadly ones tend to gain the upper ground, since they aren't spending any resources on producing any poisons. Where there's a balance of intermittent similar but poisonous mushrooms, they take down enough animals to optimize their niche.

There are dozens of such indirect webs of influences and consequences that spread from seemingly simple adaptations, and it's amazing that things seem so balanced and stable as they do. It's a constant arms race of attacks and temptations and strategies.

Amanita Muscaria seems like it does use colour as a warning signal - it's bright red.

A corpse keeps other grazers away for the rest of the season.

I appreciate your thirst for knowledge

I wonder if Hamilton Morris has tried it yet. Hamilton, if you're reading let us know when you're going to let us hear about it :)

For anyone vaguely interested in psychoactive/psychedelic drugs, his books and videos are amazing:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamilton%27s_Pharmacopeia

Sorry to use a reddit-ism, but "this should be at the top" - for safety.

Sounds like Hallucinogen persisting perception disorder

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallucinogen_persisting_percep...

"Days"?!? Hard pass. My experiments with shrooms in college was fun, but I couldn't deal with the 8-12 hours of hallucinating.

From the Wikipedia

> In 2023, Lanmaoa asiatica received international media attention after U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen was reported to have eaten a dish that contained it during an official visit to China. Yellen stated that the dish had been thoroughly cooked, and she experienced no ill effects (hallucinations).

It seems Rubroboletus sinicus, another bolete, is also suspected to have this effect. These hallucinogenic mushrooms are collectively known as "xiao ren ren" in China.

They seem to be relatively well known in parts of China, the Philippines, and Papua New Guinea but the ethnomycological work in English is just not really there.

It also seems like it's most likely something in the tryptamine class which could explain the blue bruising. The Wikipedia page has more info

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallucinogenic_bolete_mushroom

> mushroom sized > blue when bruised > make see small fairy people

did they found the schtroumpf village ?

These mushrooms have been eaten for thousands of years. Does it really count as a new discovery? Maybe isolating the specific compound does.

Or a new reality…

According to Wikipedia, the Yunnan mushrooms indeed have their hallucinogens broken down after cooking: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallucinogenic_bolete_mushroom

Good guess!

Although, the local hospital records imply that hallucinations can last for days or even months, so uh, probably not a great idea to go looking for them...

Could be that the mushroom just temporarily interferes with the substances the elves put in our water supply to keep us in the dark?

I think it makes sense given the following:

- Your brain has been trained extensively to recognize faces / people. Even very small babies can do this.

- Your brain processes a large amount of mostly noise, and sometimes mislabels noise as objects, which trends towards face-like things (see: seeing faces in clouds, people in shadows etc.) Various classes of substances make this effect more noticeable (even stimulants, including caffeine)

- The jump from that to 'elves' is largely just cultures have some form of small magical person.

Since we're in the topic of elves and common hallucinations, I want to share these Salvia trip replicas that some say are extremely accurate:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z2IRKuS3sSE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65XfIpJdlEY

Would be interesting if the chemical mechanism is related or similar to the DMT one that creates the "machine elves" experience.

Lilliputian hallucinations are also common in mental illnesses with hallucinations. Definitely some kind of physical foundation for it in the human brain.

reminds me of trip reports from people trying Salvia Divinorum - there's even a name for these tiny people, 'Smelves'

Occam’s razor would say they’re real.

I wonder what lab rats would experience - lots of tiny rats ?

These mushrooms are small, these elves are far away.

Perhaps human-like creatures are so common in drug hallucinations because we're human, social animals, creatures who are maximally interested in other humans. If you gave drugs to dogs then perhaps they'd see human-like things mixed with dog-like things. I assume crocodiles, solitary animals, would see nothing besides wounded fish or maybe sexy female crocodiles.

The natalensis story is even stranger: the underground was growing what they thought was natalensis for many years, until someone finally did the sequencing and found out that what everyone had grown and loved was actually new to science. At this point last year, their "natalensis" received its proper scientific name, ochraceocentrata. The underground then had to go out and fetch some actual natalensis, which is only just now being introduced to those circles (eg by Yoshi Amano). I haven't yet tried true natalensis, but ochras are definitely distinguishable from the usual cubensis, experentially, and I'd heartily recommend them to anyone that likes that kind of thing.

The issue is lanmaoa asiatica is ectomycorrhizal, meaning it grows exclusively on the roots of certain plant species in a symbiotic relationship. This is not like TTBVI or p. ochraceocentrata (misclassified as p. natalensis until recently) where amateurs can produce grain spawn with relative ease. Cultivation would involve planting or having access to the correct host species (Yunnan pine) which is a prohibitive barrier for most.

It's also not yet known if the active compound can survive dehydration like psilocybin. If not, it would mean even experiencing l. asiatica will be very difficult to impossible for enthusiasts not residing in its native region.

Was my first thought as well. I had no idea those little guys were based on something real.

Probably something like temporary death and teleportation

Major in biology, do a grad program in medicinal chemistry, join a lab that already studies this.

(I know folks who read PiHKAL and thought "Hmm, this would be a nice ML training/prediction exercise")

Someone Who Isn't Me?

some breadcrumbs for your SWIM

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terence_McKenna

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamilton_Morris

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamilton%27s_Pharmacopeia

I always feel like they should bring along an artist for the trip so we can get a visual depiction of what it was like

Exploring new mushrooms is more likely to end in agonizing death than piercing the veil of reality.

Which reminds me of the psychoactive assault makers in Lina Nguyen's nanotech novels.

Testing the theory of whether psychedelics are just inside our heads or whether our consciousness travels somewhere objectively really is why this Tales From The Trip video is my favorite videos. Both men see the same blue woman which is very interesting! https://youtu.be/P_34oNWmNsc?si=_k2CG5b-TVuDaFvM

Are they seeing tiny mice...or are they seeing the same 2cm tall "people"?

McKenna also talked quite a bit about talking to little elves on DMT.

Giving up right when its getting good

Interesting. Did he find it boring, annoying, disturbing, or what?

The more I look at Animalia species the more I tend to judge this is all alien compared to ... mountains.

Eyes, hair, hands, feet, genitalia : this all becomes pretty weird if I look at it "objectively".

Spinach too is mildly toxic because of its oxalate content yet we eat it all the time. Some of those toxic saponins even have certain health benefits. There are plenty other examples of toxic foods we regularly consume: legumes contain deadly saponins, beets contain oxalates, and potatoes contain glycoalkaloids

From what I read Suillellus luridus (见手青) is completely fine when cooked

Meat is also toxic when eaten raw; that is not generally held to be a reason to avoid eating it cooked.

It does but the liliputians are invisible on photographs unless you’ve eaten the undercooked mushroom.

No the site is just having its own "fairytale-like hallucinations"

yes,but you wont care.

Just need a minority in America to associate it with