There's something appealing and romantic about foraging, and there's a special kind of calm that comes from working in your yard or garden.

But when plant encounters go wrong, you don't just get a bad taste in your mouth.

Could be your last meal.

I'm Danielle, I'm Megan, and this is off the trails, all right.

Well, welcome back everybody.

Welcome back to everybody, including me.

I feel like I've been mia.

Even though we.

Did release an episode last week, recorded that the week prior, so it does feel like we've not done any pod stuff in a long time.

Yeah, because there was the short work week for Thanksgiving, so there was the you know, extended Thanksgiving weekend.

I immediately went on my trip that weekend, and then and it was my birthday a few days ago, so I don't know, it just feels like it was like three things back to back that totally threw off a normal schedule.

Well, it's funny.

We had I had to work, but we had a school snow day on Tuesday here and my child was like, well, it's kind of disappointing because we just had all those days in a row off last week and we went to school for one day.

And now we're out again.

So he was a little bit thrown off too, a very unpopular opinion by him.

Oh, yes, we're sure because they had Wednesday through Friday off.

He's like, I just want to go to school.

He's like, would be better was at the end of the week.

Well, that's not the way weather works.

I'm sorry.

I realized Thursday would have been more convenient for breaking up your week.

But here we are, all right.

So we have two new Patreon to welcome, Amelia and Mary Ellen.

So thank you.

All right, so today's episode is a little bit different.

But I had actually we started working on this episode kind of months ago when when I had looked into the story that Megan covered.

Two weeks ago.

So it two weeks ago now that we released the mushroom hunting Yeah, yeah, I think that was like already two weeks ago.

So I had looked into that case, but for whatever reason, I didn't pursue covering it at the time, and I had started looking up other mushroom related things.

So in May of twenty twenty four, in Melbourne, Australia, ninety eight year old Loretta Maria del Rossi saw some mushrooms roading in her yard after a long stretch of rain, and she enjoyed gardening and tending vegetables, and she would also routinely pick candy lions, milk thistle, greens just like stuff from her yard to add to meals.

And originally in April, she had seen a patch of mushrooms grow, and in April she had picked them and given them a taste test without any issues, so she ended up preparing those for dinner and everything was fine.

So when she saw again that there were mushrooms sprouting in her yard, she was like, those are coming in for dinner, so.

Her and her son prepared them.

Added them to their meal, but unlike their previous experience, within hours of eating them, they both started to feel very sick, and the following day they became violently ill.

Once at the hospital, medical staff realized that they had eaten one of the world's deadliest mushrooms.

But with the name of the death cap so pretty straightforward, there's no bearing the lead on that mushroom.

I wonder if it looked similar to the ones they had previously eaten that work are safe to eat, and that's why they assumed that these may have been the same ones.

Very likely.

Loretta's condition continued to decline, and a week later she did end up dying.

Fortunately, her son did recover and death cap mushrooms are one of the deadliest organisms that you can come across in nature.

And what makes them scary is that they look very ordinary.

You know, they don't look they don't look dangerous.

I don't know what dangerous looks like, but I feel like there are some things you look at them and you're.

Like, I should not touch that.

I'm not going to touch that.

But these have a pale green or.

Yellowish cap, the white gills underneath, and just a little little stem.

But they just look like mushrooms.

Megan's looking them up.

Mm hmm.

Yeah, to the untrained eye, there's nothing dramatic or obviously threatening.

What do you think you're looking at them?

Yeah?

I mean, I guess because I don't typically forge for mushrooms, I'm nervous about any that I come across.

I guess these are semi unassuming looking, but still I would just be double and triple checking any.

That I pull from the ground.

Yeah, these tend to grow places where people are going to encounter them.

They might grow in your yard after a stretch of rain, just like along the sidewalk, just kind of anywhere.

You know, it doesn't just have to be out in the woods.

It might just be in the sideyard.

But these mushrooms have a high concentration of poisonous compounds, and it's enough to shut down the liver and kidneys, and a single mushroom can kill an adult.

And there's no way to prepare it safely.

You know how some things you have to cook or boil or do specific things with to I guess cook out that toxin or that whatever is in them that's going to cause a negative interaction.

But cooking, freezing, boiling, nothing touches the toxin in these mushrooms.

So no matter how you prepare them, it very well could be your last meal.

Yankes.

And another really dangerous thing about these particular mushrooms is how slow the poisoning symptoms appear.

Typically after someone eats them, they feel fine for anywhere from six to twenty four hours before they start to get those telltale symptoms vomiting, diarrhea, abdominal pain, things that a lot of people would just assume was food poisoning or maybe the flu.

So Unfortunately, a lot of people don't seek medical attention right away, especially because after that initial wave of terrible symptoms, many victims actually feel better for a short time, like as if they're like, okay, like I'm over the worst of it, I'm.

On the end.

But unknowingly their liver is starting to fail, and without very quickly getting medical treatment, which sometimes even includes needing a liver transplant, the outcome is often fatal.

These death kept mushrooms are responsible for the majority of fatal mushroom poisonings worldwide.

Okay, they do grow kind of everywhere, and apparently we're all bad at identifying them correctly.

So a second story out of California was from last year's New Year's Eve.

So when I was typing this out, I was like, Okay, so New Year's Eve.

Is it New Year's Eve twenty twenty four or should it have been New Year's Eve twenty twenty five, because we're going into New Year's.

And you said it's last year.

Yeah, so then I think it would be New Year's Eve twenty four, right.

I had never put too much thought into it, but I'm like, it is obviously twenty twenty four when it happened.

Should it have been like the Eve of twenty twenty five.

Right, because technically the Eve is in twenty four, but it's the Eve of twenty five, right.

People are like, shut up, like no one cares you.

Guys are just really overthinking this.

It's true.

Oh, I agree, I was so.

Last December thirty first, three people were hospitalized after eating mushrooms that they had purchased from a roadside vendor.

And obviously they were.

Expecting that they were purchasing a safe, edible variety of mushrooms, so it wasn't even like they had just randomly picked them themselves or made a purchase.

And I do think there is some implied safety when you're purchasing something.

I agree.

I feel like it's one thing if you are sort of an amateur forager and you accidentally misidentify something that's on you, but you would like to think that if you are buying it, even if it's not from like an official store, but a vendor, a vendor should know what they're selling you and that they should be able to stand behind it being right, you hope.

So yeah, However, instead of them being safe to eat, they were either misidentified or possibly even mixed with a species of mushrooms that was toxic.

All these mushrooms enjoyed growing in the same type of environment, so you might have edible, safe mushrooms growing right next to toxic ones.

So if you're not super careful and you're just grabbing whatever you see, that's a problem.

Listen, I have mushrooms on my grocery list for later, and you're making me want to cross them out.

I'll save you four dollars.

However, the costs, yeah, I don't know.

These days, it's probably like ten.

That's true.

These mushrooms were cooked at home, and eventually these people started feeling nauseous and then actually people started vomiting and heavy diarrhea and sharp abdominal pain.

By the third day, their skin and eyes were becoming yellow colored, which is a very clear indication that the liver is not functioning.

Luckily, that is when they sought medical care.

And these people were also dealing with death cap poisoning.

Another reason it took them three days to get medical treatment is they experienced that like deceptive window of time where it seemed like they were getting better and then you know the real damage of liver failure kicks in the news articles didn't list any names, so I couldn't confirm if these people survived or not.

I didn't see any.

Follow up articles about any mushroom related deaths in California in January of this year, so I'm hopeful that means they recovered, but I don't know for sure.

Next story is in Yunan, China, where an entire area was kind of plagued by this unknown cause of death that became known as sudden death syndrome.

I don't know why it took so long to connect the dots on this, because people will go out gather wild mushrooms, which is a seasonal tradition.

It's deeply ingrained in like culture in this area, so they do it every year.

But clusters of villagers would begin dying suddenly during the harvest season.

Big.

It's making a face like, yeah, why then they connect it sooner?

Yeah, a little concerning The.

Deaths were seemingly mysterious, widespread with some villagers, with some villages losing multiple people within a matter of hours.

My gosh.

After years of investigation, researchers finally identified the culprit as Trogia vanita, also called little white mushroom.

And again, this is kind of a deceptively plain mushroom that's as the nickname says.

Yes it's a little white mushroom, but it contains toxins peoable of causing cardiac arrhythmia and sudden collapse.

This mushroom doesn't cause the same like gastro intestinal symptoms that people experience with other types of mushroom poisoning.

So basically, you eat it and your heart rhythm gets out of whack and people are just collapsing and dying.

But hundreds of people died over the years before the connection was made and they were able to kind of get a public service announcement out.

The next incident takes us to Oregon in twenty seventeen, when a family of four fell extremely ill after they had made wild mushroom soup.

They were forging near the Woolamette National Forest.

They believe they had found wild chantrells, which is one of the most popular edible mushrooms.

But the problem is that there are false chantrells and jack o lantern mushrooms that grow in similar areas, and both of those things are not edible, and unfortunately to beginners or the untrained person.

They can look similar but are extremely toxic.

So that's a problem this family.

After having their soup, they experienced severe your stomach pain, nausea, ended up getting dehydrated, and they were all hospitalized for several days.

Luckily they did all survive.

But this story just reminds us.

That even things that are.

Common and supposedly easy to identify do have things that.

Look too close alike.

Yeah, no kidding, I don't know.

It just all of this kind of turns me off fro mushrooms.

I wasn't a big mushroom person before, but I would eat them on the veggie pizza.

But now I don't know.

I yeah, and I love mushrooms, and this has me questioning.

That revising your shopping list.

Yeah, so moving on from mushrooms.

Twenty twenty one, Jim Lebond was working in his Ohio backyard and he was using a chainsaw try to like cut back some overgrowth.

He had a lot of honeysuckle and weeds.

He's just you know, going out there hardcore the chainsaw, chopping down all these weeds.

And at the time it was just a irregular weekend yard cleanup.

But inside all of that brush happened to be poison hemlock, which is one of the most toxic plants in North America.

So as he was cutting.

Through all those weeds, he was unknowingly sending poison hemlock into the air.

He was then breathing it in, and the neurotoxins in hemlock are the same compound that was used to execute Socrates in ancient Greece.

I was gonna say fun but it's maybe not a fun fact, a unfun fact.

Just an interesting fact.

There we go.

Yes, these toxins interfere with the way signals travel through our nervous system, and ingesting the plant can cause respiratory paralysis, seizures, heart problems, and likely death.

But as Jim discovered, the danger isn't just from ingesting the plant, because when he chopped it up, the toxins got into the air and he.

Breathed them in, which can inflame the lungs.

It also triggers neurological symptoms and again can lead to respiratory failure.

And unlike poison ivy, there's no skin reaction, so somebody might start experiencing these respiratory symptoms, but there's no rash or itching or anything to necessarily point you in the direction of something that you were exposed to outside.

Necessarily I should have looked it up.

I don't know how they test for There must be maybe a blood test to find toxins.

Yeah, it just relies on your healthcare provider will diagnose you based on your medical history and symptoms.

I mean, okay, thanks Internet.

That was not that helpful.

And this is from like the Cleveland clinic website.

This isn't some rands like.

It's a secret how we diagnose helmut poisoning.

Yeah, I mean has all of these symptoms like sweating, vomiting, dilated pupils, excess salivation, dry mouth, rapid heartbeat, high blood pressure, restlessness or confusion, muscle weakness, tremors and seizures, slow heartbeat, low blood pressure.

I've okay, I'm saying this ironically.

I don't love any symptoms of you know, in any negative way, but I love when symptoms from the same cause will also blatantly like conflict with each other.

Like well, you could have high blood pressure or you could have low blood pressure.

Right, you could have dry mouth, or you could have excess salivation.

You could uh have severe fatigue, or you could have insomnia.

It's like okay, but like what right?

So again, uh sounds hard to diagnose if you don't know what you've been exposed to.

Yeah, it it doesn't look like.

It's because I'll be honest, if I all of a sudden like started throwing up tomorrow, I would not think what kind of plants did I encounter outside?

That's definitely not the go to.

No, I'd be now a new fear to ponder over.

But prior to this episode, no poison hemlock has now spread across most of the US and a lot of North America, and it loves to grow in like disturbed soil, so along roadside ditches, parks, backyards, anywhere.

That the soils kind of dug up.

If there happens to be seeds, they're like, that's my spot now.

And like some of these mushrooms, it does look deceptively harmless.

It has little white flower clusters that resemble Queen Anne's lace, so it's pretty, but don't pick it because you might die.

And the leaves also kind of look like parsley or wild carrots, So again, things that are very safe, but if you don't identify them correct, You're doomed.

Could be fatal very easily.

In the summer of two thousand and eight, six adults from a single family gathering sat down for a meal in Maryland for.

A home cooked stew.

Sounds warm and delicious if you like stew.

So there's potatoes, onions, tomato, garlic, and just some leafy greens in there.

But those leafy greens have been gathered by the cook from her yard.

And a few hours later everyone was experiencing a terrifying hallucinogenic episode.

No yeah, though.

They were admitted to the emergency room with symptoms including confusion hallucinization.

I don't know why I was trying with a ze.

Somewhere in that word hallucinization, thank you, No hallucination, hallucination.

There we go.

Yeah, because you said it like I said it.

Yeah, I mean it is fun to say it like it is.

Dilated pupils dilated and sluggish pupils was actually what it said.

So you sluggish pupils, I'm getting slow to respond to changes in light.

I guess.

Yeah.

I just don't like that now.

It sounds gross.

Rapid heartbeat and an altered mental state.

Some of the people were actually unconscious, while others were very agitated, delirious, combative.

So I can't imagine that emergency department with these six people coming in, and it must have been wild.

Yeah.

Medical investigators were quickly able to trace the cause to the stew, which contained leaves from gympsen weed.

It's a common yard or wildflower weed that's in the night shape family, and it contains compounds that can create those very unpleasant symptoms.

And five of those six people needed intensive care admissions.

So this is pretty serious.

Fortunately everyone did survive and over the course of several days, everybody did recover.

I think anytime that person invited me to their house, I will pick up a pizza on my way.

Yeah, I will be providing the food, thank you.

Yes.

All right.

So one of the stranger cases I think we covered was the Kamar Dobbin incident.

And I can't remember if that was a regular episode or a Patreon episode.

That's a good question.

Let me look it up very quickly, all right.

I mean I have a little recap either way.

But it was an exclusive episode, so if you are not subscribed on Patreon, go check out Exclusive forty four.

I think we even have it set up where even if you don't want to subscribe, you can purchase individual episodes.

Yes so, yeah, more good episode.

Yeah so.

The gist of that incident is in July of nineteen eighty three, seven hikers, which included six teenagers slash young adults plus or instructor, had set out for hike.

The first several days everything was fine and the group was actually ahead of schedule.

But one morning, after breakfast, everything changed.

According to the only survivor, one member of the group suddenly screamed and collapsed.

His muscles then seized, He was foaming at the mall, blood was coming from his nose and ears, and he died within minutes, and before the group could really even re the group's leader, Ludmilda, collapsed in the very same fashion, then another hiker.

Some of the remaining people tried to run or make their way down the mountain, but they only made it a short distance before they too experienced symptoms and died extremely quickly.

Estimates are less than an hour, you know, obviously the single survivor was not watching her watch.

I'm sure, so somewhere between an hour and maybe a couple of hours.

All of these people were dead.

When search teams eventually found the body, they were scattered kind of across the mountain side, Some were partially undressed, some had signs of bruising and internal injury, but the autopsies kind of didn't match the symptoms that were described.

Five of the hikers were listed as dying from hypothermia and the instructor's cost of death was listed as a heart attack, and there were signs of lung damage and protein deficiency on all of the victims.

But there wasn't anything specific in these findings that really gave a true cause of death or cause of the symptoms.

And this case has numerous theories and is still unsolved.

But one theory that does hold some weight is that there was mushroom poisoning involved and the instruct.

Instructa I don't know where that came from.

I love it.

The instructor, Ludmilda, was a known forager and the group had food with them, but gathering wild plants wasn't uncommon while out on these hikes, and certain Siberian mushrooms contain fast acting neurotoxins that can cause convulsions, rigid muscles, frothing at the mouth, bleeding and that rapid collapse, so very similar to what the survivor described seeing.

And many mushroom toxins also break down very quickly in the.

Body, meaning.

There may not have been anything to show up in an autopsy done, you know, a week or however long later.

There are some toxins that damage internal proteins and organs so like aggressively that it does give the appearance that the body is malnourished, which I think that was one of the symptoms or findings that kind of caught me off guard when we covered this episode originally.

But as I did some more research into mushroom poisoning, that came.

Up so that would make sense.

And all of the victims had bruised lungs and that could have been caused by toxins that trigger fluid build up within the lungs.

So we'll never know for sure, but.

The more I read into this particular theory, I do think that it's very likely that they had eaten toxic mushrooms.

Did we cover that theory?

We did, but not as in depth as we could have.

I think there are just so many theories that we kind of covered several.

Yeah, definitely another.

Strange case from an episode that you covered is the death of Jason Chase in two.

Thousand and two.

He disappeared while hiking in New Zealand and his body was later found in a pretty remote, densely overgrown as like a gully right or like a yeah, And the autopsy didn't really determine a cause of death.

There was no sign of trauma, no drugs or toxins that they were able to find in his system at least, so there was no conclusive medical explanation for why he died.

But because of the unusual location where he was.

Found and the lack of any physical injuries, there was the theory that Jason may have come into contact with the New Zealand tree netle, and that plant is far more dangerous than any other nettles that you might come into contact with, and they're known to cause intense pain, neurological symptoms, respiratory distress, and there has been at least one other documented case where someone did die from interactions with this plant.

Supporters of the theory think that Jason may have brushed against a large amount of the plant and then possibly inhaled particles or just happened to have a very severe reaction.

That led to sudden collapse.

I can't remember.

It was like a doctor I think that was talking about it with who was talking about this case with his colleague like years later, and the colleague was like, Oh, that sounds like tree nettles, and so they went back and looked into it more, and I think that's how they were able to pretty much determine that that's what caused his death.

Yeah, so these toxins break down very quickly in the body, and they wouldn't have shown up in a routine toxicology screening.

So, like you said, the death still technically remains unsolved, but I think years later the plant encounter became the leading theory.

So here's another weird mystery plant experience.

It's called pine mouth syndrome, and it's strange and an unexplained reaction that some people have after eating pine nuts, and it includes delayed toxicity and symptoms might not show up for forty eight hours, which is really stressful if you're like, what's going on and you have to think back to two days, go to.

What you were doing.

Yet to even consider that you'd have to go back forty eight hours to be like what did I do or in jest or anything that right.

So there have been some hikers who have collapsed on trails after eating wild pine nuts, experiencing symptoms that do mimic poisoning, but then toxicology shows nothing.

And luckily, this syndrome is not deadly from any cases that I was able to find.

But the condition causes.

An extremely strong metallic or bitter taste that usually begins about two days after eating pine nuts, and it lasts for days or even weeks.

People describe it as tasting metal or just having a mouthful of pennies for days or weeks when they eat or drink anything, that taste is amplified.

So I suppose if you're looking for a quick diet, I'm sure eating anything with that metal taste, you're not going to want to do it.

And people have experienced this after eating pine nuts found in the wild, but also packaged pine nuts.

So the FDA confirmed that this experience is a real thing, but the cause still remains unknown.

Thousands of cases have been reported worldwide, and there was a spike in the early like twenty tens before regulators began looking at some of these imported pine nuts.

A little more closely, so there's kind of no rhyme or reason as to why one person might eat these pine nuts and have that experience and someone else could beat the same things and not.

So just a very strange mystery.

I mean, luckily it's not deadly, but still not a good experience.

No sounds unpleasant.

And finally, I have a case from Maine in twenty twenty.

A couple had.

Harvested what they thought were wild elderberries, and elderberries are known for like immune system support and antioxidant properties, so I think we see all kinds of things marketed with elderberries in them.

They made wine with these berries, and we're.

Probably expecting, like a nice homemade wine, a nice quiet evening at home, but instead they experienced nausea, vomiting, and eventually they came to the point of collapse.

It turns out they had misidentified this plant all together, and they actually collected the berries of a toxic dogwood species.

Elderberries are safe only when fully cooked, so I think initially they thought that maybe they hadn't cooked or processed the berries enough and that was why they.

Were experiencing those symptoms.

But they had just misidentified what they had collected altogether.

Man mm hmmm.

Luckily the couple did survive, but only because they got medical treatment quickly.

So this case is a perfect reminder that it's not just mushrooms.

We need to be really careful with berries, greens, roots, pretty much anything has the potential to have a dangerous look alike.

When Actually, one final quick mushroom related story, and I guess we'll put this in the interesting fact category, is that the parents and siblings of Daniel Fahrenheit, the creator of the Fahrenheit temperature scale, his family all died from mushroom poisoning in seventeen oh one.

No way, mm hmm.

I actually learned this little fact reading a book called Out Cold, a chilling descent into the macabre, controversial, and life saving history of hypothermia.

So that's a really interesting book, but it was just funny to hear about mushroom poisoning.

Yeah.

I would not have expected to find that fact in that book.

Yeah.

So each of these stories carry the same lesson, delivered in a variety of unpleasant ways.

Enjoying and connecting with nature feels like something we should just naturally know how.

To do, but it's not without dangers.

Nature is full of imitators and looking likes and potential killers.

So if you don't know what you're doing, don't eat it.

I think that's a good rule.

And also there were a few of those stories of just.

The exposure, not even ingesting of them.

So you know, if you're doing yard work, if you're clearing brush, or if you're out in the woods, there is that need to also be aware of what you're coming in contact with in that sense as well.

And I would be curious because I do have a plant identification app that I use a lot, but it relies on the picture you take of this plant, and since some of these things look so similar, I would be curious how accurate the AI identification.

Is with these apps.

Yeah, I'd be curious too if they may have a tendency of misidentifying as well.

M m.

That's scary too.

So you can't rely on yourself or AI either.

One misidentification can become a medical emergency, so just be careful you're out there getting snacks from the woods or like you said, just being out in the woods.

You never know or even your yard.

Mm hmm, all right, well, thanks, I feel like that was actually a kind of interesting deviation from our normal episode format.

There are some good takeaways from that, all right, Well until next week, stay safe,