Edible wild mushroom identification book written by AI

[jpanhalt]

@Infraviolet
Have you read the theory of why some plants have capsaicin in their seeds and others do not?  I find it intriguing, but won't spoil it for you.  Hint, only mammals are susceptible to capsaicin.

[tggzzz]

I suppose it's conceivable that spores might be built to survive a digestive system. This paper,
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2478712/
suggests such a mechanism for yeasts vs. fruit flies.

Some exploit the digestive system. Consider the lifecycle of Cordyceps militaris: caterpillar eats spore, spore eats caterpillar. I wash my hands needlessly carefully after picking them

There's also the Chinese medicine Ophiocordyceps sinensis

[jpanhalt]

There is also Bacillus popilliae (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milky_spore ) that can be used to get rid of grubs.  A friend and I had planned to try to get it to sporulate in vitro on a commercial scale.  Unfortunately, he was severely disabled in an accident, and we couldn't continue that work.   That was in the 1980's.   By now, others may have succeeded.

[NiHaoMike]

One of those books just claimed several victims.

[IanB]

Not good.

When you buy a reference book, I think you need to check who the author is, and check the credentials of that author.

And of course, there will need to be laws in place to require books with non-human authors to be clearly identified as such with an obvious disclaimer. Cigarette packets have a warning: "Smoking cigarettes can seriously damage your health." AI generated books should have a legally mandated warning: "Any and all content in this book might be fiction. Do not trust anything it says."

[SiliconWizard]

Maybe it's natural selection through artificial intelligence.
Odd days.

[Psi]

New Zealand is a pretty safe place to be, but even here every few years you read in the news that some tourists, usually from china, went on a nature walk and came across some mushrooms, cooked them up for dinner and put their entire group in hospital.

I don't recall any of them dying but yeah, not good.

The Poison pie mushroom (Hebeloma crustuliniforme) can look similar to the typical edible field/meadow mushroom 

https://www.trufflesandmushrooms.co.nz/Some%20poisonous%20forest%20mushrooms%20w.pdf