West African death cap
Amanita albolimbataToxic - and the most serious cases can be fatal. Never eat it, and wash your hands after handling.
Never eat a mushroom you are not 100% sure of - check the look-alikes below, and always cook wild mushrooms.
How to recognise it
A pale, whitish-to-greyish Amanita distinguished by a white-bordered (albo-limbate) rim to the sac-like volva at the stem base.
It carries the section's diagnostic combination: white free gills, a ring on the stem, and a basal volva.
Detailed morphology is still sparsely documented.
Why it's dangerous
The first Amanita confirmed to cause fatal amatoxin poisoning in West Africa.
It grows in the same wooded ground where edible Amanitas ('tente', A. loosii and relatives) are traditionally gathered, so a mistake here is deadly.
Data are limited, but its placement in section Phalloideae and confirmed poisonings mark it clearly.
Toxin
Amatoxins - cyclic octapeptides, chiefly α-amanitin - shut down RNA polymerase II, so cells stop making protein and the liver and kidneys fail.
They are not destroyed by cooking, drying, freezing or soaking.
Symptoms
Poisoning runs in four phases:
- 1A symptom-free latency of 6-24 hours.
- 2Then violent vomiting and watery diarrhoea.
- 3Then a deceptive false recovery of one to three days while liver enzymes quietly climb.
- 4Then liver and kidney failure on days 3-5, often fatal without intensive care or a liver transplant.
The long silent start is what makes it so deadly - victims rarely connect their illness to the meal.
Staying safe
Never eat it. Amatoxins survive all cooking and preservation, and the delayed onset hides the danger until organ damage is underway.
Always uproot the whole stem to check for a volva, and treat every white-gilled, white-spored mushroom with a ring and a sac-like base as lethal.
Where & when it grows
Habitat
Ectomycorrhizal with African woodland trees such as Isoberlinia and Uapaca in the Sudanian and Guinean zones of West Africa, fruiting with the rains.
When
Appears with the West African rains. Its exact timing tracks the local wet season rather than a fixed calendar.
How it grows
An ectomycorrhizal Amanita: the mycelium lives for years threaded through tree roots, and a fruitbody is only the brief above-ground tip of that partnership, pushed up within a few days of warm rain.
Look-alikes
The locally eaten edible Amanita 'tente' (and A. loosii) it grows alongside - the central and most dangerous confusion in African Amanita foraging.
The introduced death cap (A. phalloides) in planted forests.
Introduced into some African planted forests; another deadly amatoxin Amanita with white gills, ring and volva.
Locally gathered edibles of the same woodlands; distinguishing them from the deadly white/grey Phalloideae species is the core skill - when unsure, do not eat.
A reference guide - never an edibility guarantee. When in doubt, leave it out.