General Meeting and Speaker, November 2021 | Alan Rockefeller: Psychoactive Mushrooms of North America

After the business part of the meeting, join Alan Rockefeller, live on Zoom from the Netherlands for an overview of both common and rare psychoactive fungi, focusing on photography, habitat and locations of our west coast species.

Alan Rockefeller is a photographer, computer hacker, biohacker and mushroom identification specialist who currently lives in Oakland, California. In 2001 he began his autonomous studies in the field of mycology, beginning with the collection of fungi in California. Each year since 2007 he has traveled to Mexico to collect mushrooms, and has now photographed more than 1,000 species of fungi from Mexico. Based on phylogenetic and microscopic analysis he has identified several species not described in the scientific literature.  Rockefeller discovered and named Psilocybe allenii, a psychoactive mushroom (magic mushroom) from the West Coast of the United States. He recently co-authored a 2020 publication characterizing five Psilocybe species.Alan regularly identifies mushrooms for several fungus fairs in Mexico and the USA in addition to identifying fungi on websites such as Mushroom Observer, Facebook, the Shroomery and iNaturalist.

Photo: Psilocybe allenii. © Alan Rockefeller (CC-BY) (from inaturalist.org, obs. 4675472)