We refuse to tell you what your mushroom is.

Snap a photo, get a species. That’s how Picture Mushroom and Seek work. It’s also how people end up in emergency rooms.

Mycologists estimate that confident field identification — from features alone, without a microscope — is possible for only 30 to 40 percent of mushroom species. The rest need spore measurements, chemical spot tests, or DNA sequencing. A one-photo ID app cannot do any of that. So it guesses. Confidently. With a number.

We don’t do that. Ever.

What does the underside look like — gills, pores, teeth, or smooth? Is the stem hollow or solid? Bulbous base? Volva? Ring? What’s the spore print colour? What tree was it near? What’s the substrate? Where are you on the planet?

That’s the work. We walk you through it. After ten finds with Dr. MycoTek you’ll understand mycology. After ten finds with an ID app you’ll have ten guesses.

HIGH means the features cleanly point to one species with no plausible alternatives. MODERATE means two or three candidates remain. LOW means there isn’t enough information to narrow it down — and the honest answer is to take a spore print, post to your local mycological society, or ask somebody with eyes on the actual mushroom.

We’d rather tell you we don’t know than tell you a chanterelle when it’s a Jack O’Lantern.

Every identification automatically includes the dangerous look-alikes. Match an Agaricus, hear about the Destroying Angel. Match a chanterelle, hear about Jack O’Lanterns and false chanterelles. Match a honey mushroom, hear about Galerina marginata — the deadly Galerina that grows on the same logs.

This is hard-coded into how we answer. It can’t be turned off. Mycologists don’t skip this step. Neither do we.

Read every chat response. You will never find the words “safe to eat” without a qualification. We don’t close that loop. The only people who can responsibly close it are humans with the mushroom physically in front of them.

If you’re standing in the woods with an unfamiliar mushroom and want a yes-or-no, we’re the wrong tool. What we are is the patient mentor who teaches you what to look for, what to test, and who to call.

Every mushroom photo on this site comes from iNaturalist or Mushroom Observer — the same datasets serious mycologists use. We credit every photo. We use them under their Creative Commons licenses.

The cultivation guidance the AI surfaces draws on tens of thousands of community discussions from Shroomery’s public Mushroom Cultivation forum — the home of nearly every home-cultivation tek ever published. We synthesize; we don’t copy. The original threads are where you go for unfiltered grower conversation.

Every photo and observation you contribute is stored on our servers and kept until you delete it. That’s the point of building a personal mycology record — your field slips, your grow journals, your spore prints become a permanent reference you can come back to years later.

Public observations appear on the community feed and map with location fuzzed by ~10 km for privacy. Private observations (a paid feature) are visible only to you.

One-click self-serve deletion is a paid-plan feature. Free users can email us to delete any photo, observation, or their entire account — we honour these requests free of charge regardless of plan, per PIPEDA / GDPR / CCPA. We don’t sell your data. We don’t train other companies’ models on it. Full details in our privacy policy.

Foray with your local mycological society. Post to iNaturalist. Bring physical specimens to identification days. These are the gold standard. Dr. MycoTek is here to help you prepare, narrow your candidates, and learn faster — not to replace the people who know your region better than any AI can.