Amanita brunnescen

🏷️ Description

Meet Amanita brunnescens, also called the Brown American Star-Footed Amanita or simply the Cleft-Foot Amanita — a curious North American mushroom with a dramatic base and a mysterious temperament. Known for its variable colors and odd bruising behavior, this member of the deadly Amanita genus may look like a cousin of the infamous death cap (A. phalloides), but it tells its own story.

🌳 Habitat & Distribution

Amanita brunnescens is mycorrhizal, forming symbiotic partnerships with both hardwoods and conifers. It grows alone, scattered, or in groups during summer and fall across eastern North America, east of the Rocky Mountains. Moist forest floors and shaded glens are its favorite haunts.

🔎 Identification

🍄 Cap

• Size: 1.18 to 4.33 inches (3 to 11 cm)

• Color: Wildly variable — from pale citrine, olive, and whitish to gray-brown, red-brown, and even bicolored (half pale, half brown)

• Surface: Tacky when wet, dull when moist, shiny when dry

• Texture: Sometimes with scattered white to tan warts, lacking veil remnants on the margin

• Shape: Bell-shaped to convex, becoming nearly flat

• Other: May have radial fibers or streaks; sometimes distinctly darker at the center

🍥 Gills

• Color: White to cream

• Attachment: Free or slightly attached to the stem

• Spacing: Crowded

• Other: Stain brown with age, feature a faint line and small down-turned notch near the stem

🦶 Stem

• Size: 3.54 to 4.25 inches (9 to 10.8 cm) tall; 0.47 to 0.59 inches (1.2 to 1.5 cm) thick

• Color: Cream white, bruising or staining reddish-brown especially near the base

• Shape: Tapers upward and flares slightly at the apex

• Base: Ends in a cleft, chiseled, or vertically split bulb — a key ID feature!

• Ring (Annulus): Skirt-like, persistent, near the apex, white, often streaked or browning with age

• Volva: Usually absent but may leave brownish patches on bulb rim

🧄 Odor & Taste

• Odor: Faint, raw potato-like, especially noticeable when cutting the stipe or bulb

• Taste: Not recorded

🔬 Microscopic Features

• Spores: (7.0–9.5 × 6.5–9.2 µm), globose to subglobose, occasionally broadly ellipsoid, amyloid

• Spore Print: White

• Basidia: 4-spored, no clamp connections

• Pileipellis: Cutis or ixocutis (hyphae 2–6 µm wide)

• Subhymenium: Ramose or with inflated cells

🌿 Variation

• Var. pallida: Nearly identical but with a white to pale citrine cap. Some mycologists treat this as a color variant rather than a separate variety, due to frequent intergrading forms found in the wild.

👀 Look-Alikes

• Amanita flavorubens: Yellow warts that retain color longer, also bruises red.

• Amanita asteropus: European analogue of A. brunnescens.

• Amanita phalloides: More toxic and has a more persistent volva; do not confuse them!

☠️ Toxicity

Its edibility is unknown, and toxicity is suspected. Due to its resemblance to deadly Amanitas and unclear safety profile, it should not be consumed under any circumstances.

Photo sources:

Photo 1 - Author: Robbie (CC BY 4.0)

Photo 2 - Author: Sarah Culliton (CC BY 4.0)

Photo 3 - Author: Luke Padon (CC BY 4.0)

Photo 4 - Author: Seth G. Breeding (CC BY 4.0)