Mushroom Botanical Illustrations and Elementary's A Study in Charlotte

Summary: Blue Angels mushroom botanical illustrations and photographs cover wild fungi, not tainted mushrooms in Elementary's A Study in Charlotte Feb. 18, 2016.

Blue Azure mushrooms (Psilocybe azurescens); Pacific County, southwestern Washington; Nov. 6, 2010: shroom360, CC BY SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Blue Angels mushroom botanical illustrations and photographs attest to the distribution ranges and physical appearances that camera angles avoid in the Elementary procedural drama episode A Study in Charlotte Feb. 18, 2016.

Director Guy Ferland and writers Robert Doherty and Robert Hewitt Wolfe broach North America's psychedelic mushrooms in Season 4's 13th episode, the series' 85th episode overall. Sherlock Holmes (Jonny Lee Miller) considers how collectors and consumers of hallucinogenic mushrooms can confuse psychedelic Blue Angels, related golden caps and toxic death caps mushrooms. Sherlock declares that "The mushrooms the [dead QBU] professor [of botany, Joseph Ballantine,] has in his tea are pure Psilocybe azurescens, also known as Blue Angels."

Sherlock explains that Blue Angels, also called Astorians, Blue Runners and Flying Saucers, "are a potent and relatively rare species native to the Columbia River Delta."

"Three bags of dried mushrooms" and "extract of Amanita phalloides, the aptly-named death cap mushrooms" respectively function as "poor quality Psilocybe cubensis" and "highly concentrated poison."

Blue Angels mushroom botanical illustrations and photographs give "simple mushrooms" whose "naturally-occurring compound" gets "minds to the realm of spirit, allowing us to touch the eternal." The Hymenogastraceae (puffball-shaped, from the Greek ὑμήν [humén, "membrane"] and γαστήρ [gastér, "belly"]) agaric and false-truffle family members have elliptical, purple-black or purple-brown, smooth pore-tipped spores. Smooth pore-tipped 0.00047- to 0.00053- by 0.00026- to 0.00032-inch (12- to 13.5- by 6.5-micron to 8.0-micron) spores irradiate into fluffy-looking, web-like white mycelium (μύκης [múkēs, "mushroom"]).

Blue angels mushroom botanical illustrations juggle 7- to 14-day journeys from spores to mycelia at real-world, 70 to 80 degrees Fahrenheit (21.11 to 26.6 degrees Celsius).

Blue Angels mushrooms keep to three- to four-week colonization schedules, from spores to mycelia with tiny white-bumped dots to pinheads, every September through December or January.

Blue Angels mushroom pilei (from the Greek πῖλος [plos, "felt"]), with 1.18- to 3.94-inch (3- to 10-centimeter) diameters, look like age-flattened, cone-like, convex (upward-curved) short caps. Brown lamellae (from the Latin lāmellae, "small, thin metal plates") manifest black stains when mishandled and mottling when matured into spore-making gills with non-undulating, white-fringed margins.  Blue-bruised, thin-stemmed, 3.4- to 7.88-inch (9- to 2-centimeter) by 0.12- to 0.19-inch (0.3- to 0.5-centimeter) stipes (from the Greek στέφω [stéphō, "encircle"]) need thick, white-tufted bases.

Blue Angels mushroom botanical illustrations and photographs offer Agaricales (from the Greek ἀγαρικόν [agarikón, "tree-fungus"]) order members observed in 1995 by Paul Stamets and Jochen Gartz.

Blue Angels mushrooms possess smooth-surfaced caps until knobby with umbō (raised centers), opaque or yellow from dryness, pitted blue-black from contact, sticky or transparent from moisture.

The blue-blackening qualifies as an indicator of the hallucinogenic compounds baeocystin, psilocin and psilocybin that queue up throughout the above-ground fruiting and below-ground vegetative fungal parts. Respective 0.35, 0.38 and 1.78 percentages of baeocystin, psilocin and psilocybin that mycologists Gartz and Stametz retrieved in 1995 result in government-proscribed psilocybe cultivation and use. Deciduous woodchips and woody debris-rich sandy soils support native Blue Angels mushroom populations in northwestern riparian woodlands of Oregon, specially around Astoria and Tillamook, and Washington.

Blue Angels mushroom botanical illustrations and photographs transmit distribution ranges, life cycles and physical appearances of bitter-tasting mushrooms for terminal trips when tainted with toxic toadstools.

Sherlock Holmes (Jonny Lee Miller) and Joan Watson (Lucy Liu) have concerns about tainted psychedelic mushrooms in Elementary tv series' A Study in Charlotte (season 4 episode 13): StarWatchByline ‏@SWByline via Twitter Jan. 28, 2016

Acknowledgment

My special thanks to talented artists and photographers/concerned organizations who make their fine images available on the internet.

Image credits:

Blue Azure mushrooms (Psilocybe azurescens); Pacific County, southwestern Washington; Nov. 6, 2010: shroom360 at Mushroom Observer, CC BY SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons @ https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Psilocybe_azurescens_123010.jpg

Sherlock Holmes (Jonny Lee Miller) and Joan Watson (Lucy Liu) have concerns about tainted psychedelic mushrooms in Elementary tv series' A Study in Charlotte (season 4 episode 13): StarWatchByline ‏@SWByline via Twitter Jan. 28, 2016, @ https://twitter.com/SWByline/status/692848985879420933

For further information:

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"A Study in Charlotte." Elementary: The Fifth Season. Los Angeles CA: Paramount Pictures Corporation, Feb. 18, 2016.