Three Amanitas

by Nicolette L. Cagle, Ph.D., August 5, 2026

Location: Durham, NC, along the Eno River

The woods were warm, wet, and thick with humidity this morning. Dark and close, the trees released large, gentle drops of rain that sat patiently until a breeze brushed the canopy, releasing them to the forest floor of dense brown leaves and thriving fungi.

Today, the Amanitas are having their moment. Three species were fresh and bright, obvious among the dark leaf litter and rotting logs: False Caesar’s (Amanita parcivolvata), Jackson’s Slender Caesar (Amanita jacksonii), and Plateful of Pyramids (Amanita polypyramis). Though they share a genus (Amanita), they are all in different sections (Amanita, Caesareae, and Roanokenses, respectively), and each species has a different story to tell.

Above: Photos of False Caesar’s (Amanita parcivolvata), Jackson’s Slender Caesar (Amanita jacksonii), and Plateful of Pyramids (Amanita polypyramis) by Nicolette L. Cagle. Note that these identifications are tentative.

While the False Caesar looks like a king in the Caesareae, it’s an Amanita in section Amanita, associated primarily with hardwood forest denizens, including white oaks and red oaks, hickories, and maples. Even when it grows in more parklike environments, it sticks close to the trees. The scarlet cap of this Amanita is strikingly covered with whitish to pale yellow warts. Its gills are whitish, too.

Like the other two Amanitas presented today, this is an ectomycorrhizal species, meaning the fungus forms a sheath around the outside of tree roots, growing between the cells of the tree root without penetrating them, and forming a symbiotic relationship. The fungus receives photosynthetically fixed carbon derived from the tree’s sugars, and the fungus helps the tree absorb more water and nutrients from the soil (Wolfe et al., 2012).

Jackson’s Slender Caesar is bright and smooth, an elegant species and a true Caesar in section Caesareae. Its cap is nearly orange and unusually smooth. The gills tend to be yellow, and it emerges from a white, sacklike volva (Tulloss, n.d.-a). Volvas are important, both as protection for young mushrooms and for identification. In essence, the volva is a saclike structure at the base of a mushroom’s stem, a leftover of a protective layer of tissue, called a universal veil, that completely encloses the mushroom when it is young. As the mushroom grows, it bursts through this protective sheath, leaving the volva behind (see photo for an example).

Mushroom identification on the fly can be tricky. So it’s important to know that molecular studies are changing the way we identify this species, and recent evidence supports at least seven species within the Amanita jacksonii complex (Sánchez-Ramírez et al., 2026). Even here in the Southeast, a new and similar species, Amanita angelica, was described in 2025 from oak habitats (Matheny et al., 2025). The yellow gills are an important identifying feature of Amanita jacksonii, particularly because A. angelica has light cream-colored gills.

The third species here is Plateful of Pyramids (Amanita polypyramis). This is a white mushroom that sports pyramidal warts (remnants of its universal veil) on its cap and can get very large. It lacks the large, sacklike volva of Jackson’s Slender Caesar and is also ectomycorrhizal. While it is found in pine-oak woods, it is particularly associated with oaks. This species is considered potentially poisonous and should not be eaten (NC State Extension, n.d.). Interestingly, one of its key identifying features is its smell, which has been described as soap-like or chlorine-like (Tulloss, n.d.-c).

In Mexico, this species has an odd story. Material once described as Amanita alexandri was later determined to be A. polypyramis whose appearance and smell had been altered by infection with another, still-unidentified fungus. The infection gave the mushroom a distinctly cheese-like odor (Morales-Torres et al., 1999; Tulloss, n.d.-c).

All three Amanitas presented here are found in eastern North America, but their ranges differ. False Caesar’s is primarily a southeastern U.S. species, although it extends north into New Jersey. Jackson’s Slender Caesar has a much broader north-south distribution, ranging from Quebec through the eastern United States and into Mexico. Plateful of Pyramids is known from the eastern United States south through Mexico and into Costa Rica (Tulloss, n.d.-a, n.d.-b, n.d.-c).

References

Matheny, P. B., Millican, A., & Borosch, L. (2025). Amanita angelica sp. nov., a new species in section Caesareae from the southeastern United States. Southeastern Naturalist, 24(3), 306–314. https://doi.org/10.1656/058.024.0304

Morales-Torres, E., Villegas, M., Cifuentes, J., & Tulloss, R. E. (1999). Revision of Amanita alexandri and its similarity to Amanita polypyramis. Mycotaxon, 73, 477–491.

NC State Extension. (n.d.). Amanita polypyramis (Many Warts). Extension Gardener Plant Toolbox. https://plants.ces.ncsu.edu/plants/amanita-polypyramis/

Sánchez-Ramírez, S., Tulloss, R. E., Margaritescu, S., Piñero, D., & Moncalvo, J.-M. (2026). Phylogenomic species delimitation reveals distinct pace and mode of lineage evolution in Amanita jacksonii. Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution, 218, 108575. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ympev.2026.108575

Tulloss, R. E. (n.d.-a). Amanita jacksonii. Studies in the Amanitaceae. https://amanitaceae.mushroomobserver.org/?Amanita+jacksonii=

Tulloss, R. E. (n.d.-b). Amanita parcivolvata. Studies in the Amanitaceae. https://amanitaceae.mushroomobserver.org/?Amanita+parcivolvata=

Tulloss, R. E. (n.d.-c). Amanita polypyramis. Studies in the Amanitaceae. https://amanitaceae.mushroomobserver.org/?Amanita+polypyramis=

Wolfe, B. E., Tulloss, R. E., & Pringle, A. (2012). The irreversible loss of a decomposition pathway marks the single origin of an ectomycorrhizal symbiosis. PLoS ONE, 7(7), e39597. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0039597