World's First "Dark Magic Mushroom", Laced With Hallucinogen And Lethal Toxins, Discovered In US
Researchers believe synthesis of both the compounds became possible because the mushroom's ancestors swapped DNA with other species.
· NDTVA little brown mushroom found in Florida's swamps is the first umbrella-shaped species with a deadly cocktail. Called Galerina indica, the mushroom is known to make both the hallucinogen psilocybin and lethal compounds from a family called amatoxins - two of the nature's deadliest toxins. The team of researchers from University of Florida is calling it a "dark magic mushroom". While psilocybin is a mind-altering compound, amatoxins are responsible for most fatal mushroom poisonings worldwide. A paper describing the discovery has been published in Current Biology.
"These compounds are known to occur in several distantly related groups of fungi but have never been shown to co-occur within a single species," researchers said in the paper.
These mushrooms were found growing moss-covered palm trunks in Florida wetlands in 2025. They were discovered by chemist and fungal biologist Andrew Kunik.
"It's quite rare and unusual," he told Science News. He also found two related species and named them Galerina species 1 and Galerina species 2.
"We still don't fully understand why mushrooms produce psilocybin. Amatoxins may help protect mushrooms from animals that eat them, but their precise ecological role isn't entirely clear either," he added.
The original fungi was found with blue bruises.
"This finding shows that there's a lot more diversity in fungal chemistry and the ways that they're combined than we had really thought about," Anne Pringle, a mycologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told the outlet. She was not involved in the work.
Researchers believe synthesis of both the compounds became possible because the mushroom's ancestors swapped DNA with other species.
They are also warning users that these mushrooms are hard to find and not easy to differentiate, even for trained experts. So, they say people should be careful before eating Galerina indica.
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