Rare Mushroom Spores

In today’s spore store blog post, you’ll learn about rare spores:

Why Spore Vendors Like Quality Spores Don’t Carry ALL The Strains You’ve Heard About

At Quality Spores, we carry dozens of mushroom spore strains for different mushroom strains and effects depending upon your spores research objectives. Whenever we’re able to source a new, interesting, rare, or otherwise desirable strain, we do everything in our power to add it to our lineup. At the time of this writing, Quality Spores was able to source no less than three new strains in the last month, which we’d say is pretty good!

Mushroom Species By State – Grown via Wildcrafting and Grown via Spore Syringes

As you may already know, there are literally hundreds of known strains in the world—perhaps thousands of different species by state. This isn’t even counting all the various different cross strain hybrids that mycologists have cooked up both historically and in current times.

Hunting For MushroomsStates Where Different Types of Mushrooms Grow.

Mushroom Spore Vendors and Sellers For Different Spore Strains

With that in mind, you can see how no spore vendor – Quality Spores included – would be capable of sourcing and carrying all the different spore strains out there. There are just too many, and some might be nearly impossible to find (and if they can be found, then certainly not in enough quantity to sell to the burgeoning microscopy and amateur mycology communities).

Highest Quality 100% Viable Spores

So, what we decide to do instead, is to try and source the best spores such as in our Golden Teacher syringe. Our company takes its namesake quite seriously – we’d rather only carry a few dozen mushroom spore strains, but with a smaller inventory, we’re able to ensure that each spore syringe we ship out is not only packed to the brim with fully authentic spores, but that they’re of a high quality, meaning that they’re viable and offered by the best place to buy mushroom spores.

What Are Viable Spores? Are Mushroom Spores Alive?

rare mushrooms buy

You don’t want your mushroom spores to go bad.

What does “viable” mean in the context of special mushroom spores? It means that the spores are alive—if they were discovered in the wild, it’s very likely that they would be capable of colonizing whatever substrate they had available to them, assuming environmental conditions like humidity, temperature, and available nutrients were all present. This is very important for reasons we’ll make clear in just a second.

What Are Viable Mushroom Spores? They Must be Living!

Back to the notion of being viable. Why does it matter whether or not the mushroom spores are viable if they’re just going to be looked at under a microscope? It’s because for the most authentic experience, dare we say the most educational experience, the spores must be living as they would be in nature.

spore strain rarity list

Mycologists and amateur microscopists wouldn’t gain nearly as much knowledge from studying dead spores, which despite being microscopic, do in fact decay. One interested in the amateur microscopy hobby undoubtedly wants to study mushroom spores as they would discover them in nature—living, viable for reproduction, and otherwise healthy and vibrant.

But what makes a spore “healthy”? Certainly one of the large factors in judging a spore’s health is whether or not it’s contaminated. Contamination can absolutely ruin spores—bacteria and other microscopic bad guys love to consume and otherwise ruin spores.

Once a fungi grows past the spore stage a bit, they become more and more robust as they mature into mycelium and eventually produce fruiting bodies (what we call mushrooms, of course). Therefore, one of the major areas where a responsible, reliable spore vendor will always focus their efforts is on the general sterility of their spores; at Quality Spores we take this extremely seriously.

Mushroom Spore Authenticity and Spore Syringes Explained: The Difference Between a Spore Syringe and Liquid Cultures

That’s why each of our spore syringes include not only a large number of spores, but also spores that are suspended in a non-nutrient liquid solution, typically distilled water. The reason this is important is twofold: distilled water, when prepared correctly as we do, will never have any other items in it—it is, in effect, “pure” water. Therefore, there are no bacteria which could contaminate the integrity of the spores.

However, the other key thing to understand about using a non-nutrient solution like distilled water is that, as the name implies, there are no nutrients to be found in the solution. This is extremely important because if there were any nutrients in the solution, the spores might begin to undergo the early stages of colonization.

rare mushrooms

While they might not be capable of becoming fully fledged mycelium without additional nutrients and a substrate to grow in, they would form hyphae, the tiny, threadlike protrusions which are the starting point of mycelium. Since mushrooms are illegal in nearly all jurisdictions, this would be extremely problematic for us and our customers.

We’ll explain in more detail. The spores of mushrooms are legal because they do not, in fact, contain spores that are too small to have developed this compound. Mushrooms begin to manifest later in the life cycle of the fungi, and that’s when it becomes illegal.

mushrooms rare spores

Contrary to popular belief, mushroom species do not only contain the compound in the mature reproductive fungi (e.g., the fruiting body or mushroom). Mycelium can contain mushrooms as well, which makes it illegal to possess or grow in nearly all areas.

This is true at even the lowest levels, which could in fact be possible if the spores were allowed to cultivate even inside a syringe if nutrients were present. Therefore, the reason we only use non-nutrient containing liquid solutions is both to preserve the integrity of the spores from possible contamination as well as to prevent any form of colonization from occurring, which would be illegal—we do this for both our protection and yours.

This brings us to another quick point that should be made. Quality Spores doesn’t carry liquid cultures for mushroom spores for reasons which should be obvious! Any spore vendor claiming to carry liquid cultures from mushroom spore strains is either being dishonest or is breaking the law—and by shipping those live liquid cultures to you, assuming they really do contain mushroom cultures, would be illegal for you to purchase and possess also.

Liquid Cultures and Other Forms of Colonized Fungi

This is why Quality Spores and other reputable US-based spore vendors carrying spore syringes don’t carry liquid culture products or other forms of colonized fungi.

where to find mushrooms

Having said all of that, there is hope that these things will change in the future. Much work has been done on promoting the decriminalization and legalization of mushrooms throughout the United States.

This is a good sign for the future of full federal legalization of mushrooms. When that time comes, ostensibly it would in fact be legal to sell not only liquid cultures and other forms of colonized mature fungi of mushrooms, but also sell the mushrooms themselves (legislation exists already in Canada where this is possible, and we suspect that the United States will eventually follow suit).

What Are Some of the Rare Mushroom Spore Strains?

Rare Spore Strains Are Sometimes Nearly Impossible To Find

Quality Spores carries as many rare and difficult to find spore strains as possible. Some of our rarer spore strains include APE mushroom spores, Luminous Lucies, and Blue Meanies spores.

Of those three, Albino Penis Envy is likely the one that you’re most familiar with, or at least it’s parentage, which is of course Penis Envy. The strain is a cross between PF Albino and Penis Envy, which gives it a really unbelievable, unique look—in the wild, it would have a short, fat stem and a bizarre, conical, blue cap. Some researchers have described it as looking like an “alien mushroom.” Its spores are nearly transparent, making research under the microscope a real challenge.