Description
Red Boy Spores!
Comes with 10cc of Red Boy spores, an 18g needle to get your spores onto the slides, and an alcohol wipe so you can ensure that your microscope is super clean.
Interestingly (not to normal people though, don’t go talking to them about this at a dinner party for fuck’s sake) the spores of this one are often slightly reddish-tinged. Now, that ain’t the biggest amount of difference, as most spore prints are brown with a slightly purple tinge, and these are brown with a slight reddish tinge. They’re not postbox red, is what I’m saying.
There’s a cool forum post on them at The Shoomery (click it to check it out) which sadly cites a file that doesn’t exist anymore, but if you can’t be bothered to click it, it goes a little something like this: Stephen L Peele, from the Florida Mycology Research Centre, first found this red spore-producing variety. Now yes, I grant you, he probably wasn’t the first one ever to find it, but he was the first one to record it and study it. He found that it was a P cubensis, but had just mutated ever so slightly and had the potential to produce different coloured spores. What does this mean? Nothing, and everything. Does it make a lot of difference? No. Is it cool, and should it be preserved? Fuck yeah!
If the tale is true, at the time, FMRC were allowed to play around with mushrooms, but in the end good ol’ fashioned pseudo-Christian government morality won, and FMRC had all their stocks destroyed by the DEA. However, Stephen had already sent out spore prints to people in other countries, because he knew which way the wind was swinging, and he wanted to make sure this particular piece of genetic quirkiness wasn’t lost to the world. Now, the fact someone like me, a relative nobody in mycology can access and sell these spores, means that not only did he succeed, he smashed it out of the fuckin’ park. The more I read about this guy, the more I like him; he also mass-released a variety of Ps tampanensis – this made a lot of people angry because they were making money off the exclusivity of it, but again Stephen wanted to make sure that the few precious stocks of it weren’t destroyed, and so he did the morally right thing and pissed a lot of people off. I’d buy Stephen a beer, any day of the week, and hopefully one day that’ll happen.
These Red Boy spore syringes have been produced in the UK using a flowhood in order to make sure that what you see under the microscope is exactly what’s supposed to be there and nothing else – just premium Red Boy spores!
Handy dos and don’ts:
DO:
- Keep it somewhere cool and dark, it’ll keep for 6 months+
- Keep it in the fridge maybe, it’ll last for years there
- Enjoy microscopy, it’s a great hobby
- Read/watch a variety of microscopy techniques across sites like Reddit and YouTube, knowledge is power
- Be really clean when you’re handling it, it’s critical
DON’T:
- Drink it. You can, it won’t hurt you, it’s just very expensive pop at that point
- Try and grow anything with it, unless you live somewhere where that is legal
- Store it anywhere dusty, dirty, or hot
- Try and do your microscopy in a drafty, dusty room
For a bit more detailed of an explanation on exactly what to do, click here!
Product Information: contains mushroom spores, distilled sterilised water, in a sterile syringe
