- It was discovered by Teeter who mistakenly thought it was the mycelium of Amanita Muscaria. From this he connected various myths in antiquity together and suggested that this ‘fleece’ was behind them all. To see an archive of some of this work, see here.
- Much debate raged around this online for a while. Eventually there was testing done by a mycologist who specialised in Amantia’s generally. He had been curious as to whether you could indeed grow AM on grape juice and similar. This goes against all currently accepted knowledge about Amanita’s generally as they are obligate symbiotes and can only grow with a relationship to a host tree or similar. Anyway, this expert took it upon himself to document the growth of the fleece and then test the results. Upon testing it was shown that the ‘fleece’ was some sort of murcor. See here for full discussion. This led to various arguments which ended up with this expert refusing to do any more work on it.
- For some, this was the end of the discussion. For others it only opened up further questions. Why was this fleece always found with Amanita? Was it always the same species? Was it in a symbiotic relationship? Why were people reporting psychological effects after taking it? Was this fleece responsible for ibotenic acid production in AM? Or was it all psychosomatic? And so on and so on.
This topic is for discussion of potential future research into this. May I suggest we break down the discussion into the following areas.
- Firstly, exactly are we looking to find? Do we need further genetic sequencing of the ‘fleece’ or do we need to look at the chemical makeup of it?
- Secondly, once we have a rough idea of what we want to research, let us think how this can be done. What labs could we use and so on.
- We could then cost any potential work out and submit some samples to a lab. We could consider crowd funding and so on depending upon the costs involved.
Personally I think it would be a shame to allow this research to fizzle out without resolution. As a final nod to the work of Donald Teeter (whom I’m sure many of us owe at least our initial interest in Amanita Muscaria to) let us see if we can close this chapter for him before the Ambrosia Society and its work fades into the mists of time.