| Amanita karea G. S. Ridl.
"Stone-in-the-Water Amanita" :: Technical description (t.b.d.) BRIEF DESCRIPTION: The following description is based on Ridley (1991). The cap of Amanita karea is 20 - 60 mm wide, convex to plano-convex, eventually depressed in the center, grayish to fawn to grayish sepia to buff or honey to buff, viscid when young or wet, with a nonappendiculate margin and sometimes splits with the cap skin "rolling back to give a ragged appearance." The volval remnants are flat, squarish warts to fibrillose crumbs at the cap margin; the warts are rarely pointed, dark grayish sepia to mouse-gray and are arranged concentrically like ripples ("kare" in Maori). The flesh is white or pale grayish-sepia to mouse gray in center under cap skin. Gills are crowded, free, 3 - 6 mm wide, white; the short gills are subtruncate. Its stem is 38 - 70 × 5 - 8 mm, solid or tending to hollow, white to pale smoke-gray, sparsely floccose, or breaking into transverse, striate bands above the ring, white to smoke-gray or pale grayish sepia, smooth to finely scaled below the ring. The basal bulb is marginate to marginate-depressed and rounded below, 7 - 21 mm wide. Volva forms a band or rim of dark grayish sepia to fuscous remnants around the stem base. The ring is membranous, finely striate, white to sordid white at margin. The flesh is white streaked with gray. The spores measure 6.5 - 9 × 5.5 - 6.5 (-8) µm and are occasionally broadly ellipsoid to ellipsoid, occasionally globose or subglobose and amyloid. Clamps are absent at bases of basidia. Originally described from the North and South Island of New Zealand in association with Southern Beech (Nothofagus), leptospermum, Kunzea. Ridley states that in the past many specimens of A. karea were misidentified as A. nothofagi G. Stev. -- R. E. Tulloss Return to Section Validae page. Last changed 26 May 2006. |