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The Shroomverse alien looking over rolling green grassland hills in KwaZulu-Natal in summer.

SPECIES ATLAS · PSILOCYBE

Psilocybe natalensis

Named by Gartz, D.A. Reid, M.T. Sm. & Eicker, 1995

Psilocybin record: reported (one or older reports)

Full article: Psilocybe Natalensis vs Ochraceocentrata

A history of a name and a chemistry record, not an identification guide. No name, picture or description can show that a wild mushroom is safe, and poisonous mushrooms are mistaken for magic mushrooms. If someone may have eaten a wild mushroom, call a poison centre without waiting for symptoms: 1-844-POISON-X in most of Canada, 1-800-463-5060 in Quebec. Call 911 if they’re unconscious, not breathing or having a seizure.

How it was named.

Gartz and Smith collected the holotype in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, on 22 January 1994, and the name was published in 1995 in Integration 6: 29; the holotype is at LZ. Species Fungorum lists it as current, with no synonyms. Bradshaw and colleagues sequenced the holotype, and in their 2024 preprint it matched no public sequence.

Named
Gartz, D.A. Reid, M.T. Sm. & Eicker, 1995
Type specimen
KwaZulu-Natal (Species Fungorum: holotype LZ, Gartz & Smith, 22 Jan. 1994) (Species Fungorum record 545616; pin = Wikidata coordinates for KwaZulu-Natal (Q81725))
Name record
Species Fungorum
The pin marks the type locality at the level of detail the record gives: one historical collection, not a range or a place to look. Land outlines: Natural Earth.

The psilocybin record.

Every analysis we could verify, oldest first, including results that found nothing. No amounts are given: they vary between collections and this is not a potency guide.

  1. 2026

    Reported Psilocybin and psilocin quantified in indoor-cultivated material (grown from wild-collected mushrooms) identified as P. natalensis by a third-party DNA test

    Method: HPTLC. Windsor et al. 2026, J. AOAC Int. 109: 37-50

What the record doesn’t show: Commercial 'natalensis' often isn't this species: in a 2025 study such strains sequenced as P. cubensis, and the 2024 preprint found that four of five public 'natalensis' sequences cluster with P. ochraceocentrata.

Records on file.

GBIF, the global biodiversity database, held 23 occurrence records under this name, 0 of them from Canada, when we checked on October 25, 2026. Records include unverified observations and old misidentifications, so counts show where people have recorded the name, not where it grows.

See the name on GBIF

Sources

Compiled from the sources above; last checked .

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