question 17: Flesh with a grainy texture
This feature is easy to verify in practice and very useful to identify the genus Russula (brittlegills) or Lactarius (milkcaps).
It is about determining if the structure of the cells composing the mushroom is round or on the contrary, elongated as fibers.
To do so, break the stem in two equal parts, and have a look at the break.
- If the break is even and neat (like a piece of chalk being broken), we have a grainy structure. We must answer "yes" to the question.
- If on the contrary if the break is uneven, fibrous, difficult, and resembles a woodstick being broken, the structure is fibrous. In this case, answer "no" to the question.
The flesh texture being characteristic and sure to evidence, we can also here impose this criterion as a mandatory feature in the results output by the identification search engine. For example, if the unknown mushroom has an obvious fibrous flesh, by ticking both "no" and "force selected answer to criterion", we will exclude all mushrooms without a grainy flesh from the results produced by the search engine.
Examples:
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The break is here neat, non fibrous, therefore grainy. Select then "yes" in this case. |     | The break is here clearly fibrous (and even incomplete in this example), so it is not grainy. Select then "no" in this case. |
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