Mushrooms
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7correct to beat the crowd
This mushroom trivia quiz has 97 free questions with answers and covers the whole fungal kingdom: what a mushroom actually is, why fungi are closer to animals than plants, the humongous fungus in Oregon, the death cap and destroying angel, the fly agaric behind Super Mario, and the edible favourites from button and shiitake to morels, chanterelles, matsutake and truffles hunted by pigs and dogs. It also visits fairy rings, foxfire, zombie ants and The Last of Us, psilocybin's path from a Life magazine article to Oregon's ballot, and the moulds and yeasts that gave us penicillin and beer. The first questions are easy enough for anyone who cooks; the last ones will stretch amateur mycologists. Every question is multiple choice with a short explanation after you answer. Every answer has been checked against a primary source, and each question links to the page that confirms it.
30 of 97 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01A mushroom is technically which part of a fungus?
Its spore-bearing fruiting body
Its spore-bearing fruiting body is all a mushroom is: the rest of the fungus is a web of fine threads hidden in soil or wood, which sends mushrooms up when conditions suit.
Q 02Fungal cell walls contain which substance in place of plants' cellulose?
Chitin
Chitin, the horny stuff of crab and lobster shells, stiffens fungal cell walls; it is one of the features that put fungi in a kingdom apart from plants.
Q 03Genetically, fungi are more closely related to which group than to plants?
Animals
Animals. Fungi are so close to us chemically and genetically that fungal diseases are very hard to treat, yet their study was long filed under botany.
Q 04Roughly how many species of fungi had scientists formally described by 2020?
About 150,000
About 150,000 had names by 2020, yet estimates of the true total run from 2.2 to 3.8 million species, so the great majority of fungi are still unknown to science.
Q 05Ink cap mushrooms are named for what?
Dissolving into black liquid
Dissolving into black liquid is how an ink cap ends: it digests itself from the rim upward once its spores ripen, until little more than a bare stem is left standing.
Q 06What does the Malheur forest's 'humongous fungus' do to the conifers above it?
Kills them
Kills them: its root disease creeps from tree to tree on shoestring-like cords, and foresters mapping the damage found one individual, put at 2,400 to 8,650 years old, behind it all.
Q 07Which mushroom is blamed for most of the world's fatal mushroom poisonings?
Death cap
Death cap toxins survive boiling, cooking, freezing and drying, and a small piece of a single mushroom is enough to kill an adult.
Q 08Which Roman emperor is said to have been killed with a dish of poisoned mushrooms in AD 54?
Claudius
Claudius was poisoned by his wife Agrippina, in the account most ancient writers give, though they differ on the details; his death put her son on the throne instead of his own.
Q 09Alpha-amanitin, the chief toxin of the deadliest mushrooms, attacks which organs?
Liver and kidneys
Liver and kidneys fail, but the first symptoms take 6 to 24 hours to appear, long enough that many victims never connect their illness with the mushrooms they ate.
Q 10The 'destroying angel' mushrooms are notable for being what colour?
Pure white
Pure white from cap to stem, a destroying angel can pass for an edible field mushroom or, when young, a puffball, which is why foragers are told to slice puffball-like finds in half.
Q 11The white spots on a fly agaric's cap are the remains of what?
A veil that wrapped the young mushroom
A veil that wrapped the young mushroom tears apart as the cap swells, leaving white scraps stuck to the red skin; heavy rain can wash them off, so some fly agarics have no spots at all.
Q 12The fly agaric may have earned its name from its historical use to do what?
Kill flies
Kill flies: in parts of Europe the cap was crumbled into a saucer of milk, which drew house flies in and poisoned them.
Q 13Indigenous peoples of which region used the fly agaric as an intoxicant?
Siberia
Q 21What do oyster mushrooms, among the few carnivorous fungi, trap and digest?
Tiny worms
Tiny worms called nematodes are caught, killed and digested by the fungus, a rare case of a mushroom that takes live prey as well as feeding on dead timber.
Q 22Morel mushrooms are recognisable by which distinctive cap texture?
Honeycomb pits and ridges
Honeycomb pits and ridges mark a true morel, and its spores form inside the pits; the prized mushroom must be cooked through, because raw or undercooked morels can make the eater ill.
Q 23Which ancient mummy was found carrying lumps of birch fungus on leather strips, probably as medicine?
Ötzi the Iceman
Drying converts its ibotenic acid into the more potent muscimol; fatal poisonings are extremely rare.
Q 14Shigeru Miyamoto says he made Mario's power-up a mushroom because mushrooms have long been linked with what?
Magical realms
Magical realms: Miyamoto says mushrooms have always gone with them, and he has dismissed the popular story that Alice in Wonderland inspired the item as a misunderstanding of an old interview.
Q 15Button, cremini and portobello mushrooms are all what?
One species at different ages and colours
One species at different ages and colours: Agaricus bisporus is picked young as the white button or the brown cremini, and a cremini left to open out is a portobello, which is why it is also sold as a 'baby bella'.
Q 16In Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, which character sits on a mushroom smoking a hookah?
The Caterpillar
The Caterpillar tells Alice that one side of the mushroom will make her taller and the other shorter, so she breaks off a piece of each and nibbles them to set her own size.
Q 17Which Pennsylvania town is known as the Mushroom Capital of the World?
Kennett Square
Kennett Square owes the title, by local tradition, to Quaker flower growers who around 1885 began raising mushrooms in the wasted space under their carnation beds; by 2017 the area grew half the US crop.
Q 18Growers treat some mushrooms before sale to boost which vitamin?
Vitamin D
Vitamin D forms when ultraviolet light strikes ergosterol, a compound in mushrooms much like our cholesterol; farmed mushrooms grow in the dark and have almost none until growers give them a dose of UV.
Q 19Which country grows by far the most of the world's cultivated mushrooms?
China
China accounted for more than nine-tenths of the world's mushroom harvest in UN figures for 2022 and 2023, about a hundred times as much as Japan, the runner-up, whose names for mushrooms the world borrows.
Q 20Which Japanese mushroom, sold as a bundle of long, thin white stems, is named after the hackberry tree?
Enoki
Enoki are raised in the dark, which keeps them white, long-stemmed and tiny-capped; wild ones, growing in daylight on dead wood, have short stems and orange-brown caps and look nothing like them.
Ötzi the Iceman died in the Alps some 5,300 years ago with two pieces of birch fungus in his kit; it was a folk remedy into the 20th century and is toxic to whipworm, a gut parasite he carried.
Q 24Italy's white truffle, Tuber magnatum, is most associated with the countryside around which town?
Alba
Alba stages an international white truffle fair every autumn; the fungus is so prized that a single 1.5 kg specimen, sniffed out by a dog in 2007, fetched $330,000 at auction.
Q 25Why did Italy ban the use of pigs for truffle hunting in 1985?
Their digging damaged the fungal mycelium
Their digging damaged the fungal mycelium, the buried web that grows the truffles, and cut the harvest for years; a dog can be taught to point at the spot and leave the digging to the hunter.
Q 26Sows were long thought to hunt truffles so eagerly because the smell resembles what?
A boar's sex pheromone
A boar's sex pheromone was the textbook answer until a 1990 study pointed to dimethyl sulphide instead: pigs ignore the pheromone and root for the sulphur smell, expecting a meal.
Q 27Matsutake, prized in Japanese cuisine, takes its name from which tree?
Pine
Pine: matsu is Japanese for the pine tree the mushroom grows beneath; Japan's own harvest collapsed in the late 20th century, so buyers now pay high prices for matsutake picked abroad.
Q 28Huitlacoche, a Mexican delicacy, is actually what?
A fungus that infects corn
A fungus that infects corn swells the kernels into dark galls; farmers elsewhere fight it as a yield-cutting disease called corn smut, but in Mexico the young galls are a delicacy eaten in quesadillas.
Q 29The bracket fungus Laetiporus sulphureus, or sulphur shelf, has a second common name inspired by what?
Its taste and texture like poultry
Its taste and texture like poultry earned it the name chicken of the woods; most people find the young brackets good eating, but they give a minority of eaters nausea or dizziness.
Q 30Roughly how many spores can a single large giant puffball contain?
Several trillion
Several trillion: almost the whole ball, which can grow as big as a football or far bigger, is spore-making tissue that ripens into brown dust and escapes as the skin breaks up.