Amanita conicoverrucosa

The following is largely based on the original description (Wood 1997).

The cap of Amanita conicoverrucosa is usually under 70 mm wide but may be up to 100 mm wide, cream-buff to buff, occasionally with slightly gray shades, convex then plano-convex to plane, smooth, dry, with a nonstriate and appendiculate margin.  The cap is decorated with large, erect, conical warts, particularly toward the center; these are persistent, smaller towards the margin and then less robust; they are more or less concolorous with the cap surface.

The gills are free, crowded, thin, white to slightly cream, with a concolorous edge.  The short gills are present in at least one or two series.

The stem is up to 100 × 10 mm, equal, solid, and white to slightly cream.  The ring is membranous, skirt-like, pale cream, not striate, sometimes fragile and sometimes breaking apart, but always leaving a distinct remnant.  The stipe's basal bulb is usually top-shaped, strongly swollen, subabrupt, white, without a free volva limb, but with distinct volval remains as rings or zones of volval fragments.  Such fragments may also be scattered on the stem above the bulb.

The spores measure (8.7-) 9.0 - 10.5 × 7.5 - 9.9 (-10.5) µm and are subglobose to broadly ellipsoid, occasionally globose, and amyloid.  Clamps are [apparently] very rare at bases of basidia.

Wood describes the mushroom as occurring in sclerophyll forests and "tall open forests" from the state of New South Wales, Australia.  A sclerophyll forest in the Australian bush is a forest of hard-leaved plants including Eucalyptus in the overstory (wikipedia).

Based on Wood's original description, this species contains so few clamps that, for proper placement in Bas' system, the clampless stirpes need to be examined as possibilities.  There are only two choices among the stirpes described by Bas, and these are stirps Longipes and stirps Polypyramis.  Their difference is in the relative orderliness of the volva in stirps Polypyramis as opposed to irregularly disposed elements of the volva in stirps Longipes.  Unfortunately, Wood does not explicitly provide the characters necessary to form an opinion.  The fact that the warts are described as firmly conical suggests a more orderly microscopic structure.  This species fits rather well in stirps Polypyramis with the exception that the spores are a little short and a bit too round for the stirps as Bas originally described it.

Bas (1969) notes that stirps Polypyramis "bears resemblances... to the clamp bearing stirpes Virgineoides and Microlepis."  Bas' definition of stirps Virgineoides permits spores of shorter length than does the definition of stirps Polypyramis and includes taxa that have spores that are broadly ellipsoid. In particular, Wood's drawing of the volva tissue in the present species bears some resemblance to Bas' illustration of the volva for Amanita virgineoides Bas.  One might argue that since Wood's description of clamps in A. conicoverrucosa is somewhat confusing that we should consider the stirpes including taxa that are clamped.  It seems worthwhile for someone to review the present species with particular attention to clamps on the basidia in younger material particularly near the gill edge and near the margin of the cap.  Also, it is important to be aware that a clamp may become a cell in the subhymenium but even in this case their former presence can be detected by the v-shaped base of some basidia.  For the moment, we are inclined to place the present species in Amanita stirps Virgineoides.  We emphasize this decision is provisional.—R. E. Tulloss and L. Possiel

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