Lobster Mushrooms

"The Lobster Mushroom: Mushrooms Transmogrifiedby Hypomyces lactifluorum

The agitated group of flushed and feverish Fungaloids probably began their underground life as white Milk Mushrooms or Russulas. Now in extreme identify crisis, they have been destructured beyond all recognition by the parasitical fungus Hypomyces lactifluorum, which in the early stages of its invasion turns its victims bright orange with a sprinkling of cayenne specks unpleats their gills, aborts their spores, leaving nothing but blurred sterile bumps in the process, miraculously transforming the once mediocre Russula or Milk Mushroom hosts into choice edibles now known as the Lobster Mushrooms! The problem is, since all obvious clues to the host's original identity have been obliterated (even as it emerges from the soil it is already infected and lobsterized), one has to know who it was to begin with. Safe or dangerous? Hypomyces lactifluorum is happy to parasitize either!"

In publication, Page 61: "Reflections on the Fungaloids" by B.L. Williamson, Ottawa, 1992. ISBN 1-894572-65-3