There’s a bit of gallows humor you’ll hear around mushroom experts, and it goes something like this: Every mushroom is edible. Some only once.
That pithy point could serve as the unofficial subtitle of the recently released The Claudius Project (University of Virginia, 2025), the final volume in a grimly informative trio of works produced in a joint effort between the University of Virginia and the Virginia Master Naturalist Program.
A guide to the poisonous mushrooms of Virginia, The Claudius Project joins the previously published The Socrates Project (poisonous plants) and The Cleopatra Project (poisonous and venomous animals and insects) to stir up a true witch’s brew of the deadly and dangerous in Virginia’s natural world. Nothing makes for light reading like the compendium of clinical signs and symptoms to be found across the three volumes. Nausea and vomiting make for something of a throughline, but there’s also sweating, swelling, seizures, pain, cramping, blistering, bleeding, wheezing, delirium, convulsions, hallucinations, arrhythmias, asphyxiation, anaphylaxis, paralysis, organ failure, and by the way, death. To name a few.
Troublemakers & Surprises
It would not be entirely accurate, then, to say that the series saved the worst for last. But if the first two guides offered some familiar troublemakers (black widows, nightshade, hemlock, copperheads) and a few interesting surprises (the cyanide-producing caterpillar, the neurotoxic newt), The Claudius Project really cuts to the chase. Consider a few of the fungi that make their appearance: vomiting russula, deadly webcap, funeral bell, fatal dapperling, poison pie, death cap, and destroying angel…