originally posted by SFJoe:
My informant, Dr. Arturo Estrado-Torres of the Laboratorio de Sistemtica, Centro de Investigacin en Ciencias Biolgicas, Universidad Autnoma de Tlaxcala, told me that Guzmn and Ramrez-Guilln had split the former caesaria into tecomate and basii in Mexico in recent years. He'd also told me that two unnamed visiting European Amanita specialists had agreed that neither basii nor tecomate were identical to the European caesaria.
The 'nationalistic' bit was obviously in jest, Joe. Ah, taxonomy! I'll hold my breath until this distinction has been met by a sufficient international consensus and hits the scientific journals, then. I find no trace of widespread corroboration of the Guzmn and Ramrez-Guilln distinction. There's a long history of mycologists, at least here in Europe, describing a local mushroom as a separate genus only to be corrected later, with it being, at most, re-ascribed to the var. category. (BTW, that nice pic shows what appears to be a very classic and quite yummy A. caesarea, not something more or less resembling it...)
A study I have read, 'People using macro-fungal diversity in Oaxaca, Mexico' (
http://www.fungaldiversity.org/fdp/sfdp/21-4.pdf), of which Dr. Estrada-Torres is one of the authors, seems to be saying more or less what I say, but with different words, when it speaks of the "Amanita caesarea complex" having several "morphs", including A. tecomate and A. basii:
"Within the Amanita caesarea complex (Guzmn and Ramrez-Guilln, 2001), people in Ixtlan usually use a yellow-orange morph (Amanita basii) and several red ones (A. laurae, A. jacksonii and A. tecomate). They commonly referred to species of this complex as just one traditional taxon Beshia bella, but while some informants only knew and used one, others treated them as two traditional varieties. They were distinguished by the red, orange or yellow colour of the pileus, yellow lamellae, yellow ring in the stipe and because they arise from an egg. People gather them, mainly the red ones, with much care taken in particular to the yellow lamellae. This is because some specimens of A. muscaria could resemble a Beshia bella as the age or rain clears its colour and washes the pileus scales."
The very same precautions are taken here...
My point: we have many variants of A. caesarea in Europe as well, some of them identified over a century ago, such as A. caesarea var. alba or A. caesarea var. aurantia. Are there really major differences in American variants to justify there being an A. tecomate rather than an A. caesarea var. tecomate?
Ah, geeky stuff is much worse in the world of fungi than even in the world of wine... Sorry for the boring digression.
