Psilocybe stametsii
New species of magic mushroom named in honor of Paul Stamets!
The newly discovered Psilocybe stametsii was found in a cloud forest in Ecuador and has been collected twice: once in 2011 by Dr. Bryn Dentinger & colleague, and then again in 2022 by Giuliana Furci together with friends including author Robert Macfarlane, musician Cosmo Sheldrake, and judge Ramiro Ávila Santamaria.
This is the first time a species has been named after Paul Stamets, and it is especially meaningful because it is a mushroom from the genus psilocybe, a group with ancestral uses that is now being used and studied as therapeutic in modern medicine due to their production of psilocybin. Stamets has dedicated his professional life to these fungi, and is also well known for inspiring people around the world to love fungi.
The species was found in the Los Cedros Biological Reserve, which is an area protected under the Rights of Nature articles in the Ecuadorian constitution, and was published using the Index Fungorum e-publishing tool hosted by the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew Gardens, which is a modern approach to accelerating species discovery by circumventing the hurdles of conventional scientific journal publication for naming new species. (Amanita galactica was published using the same tool).