View the spoiler for my guess at what I think it might be, but please first come to your own conclusion before looking at mine — I don't want to bias your guess.
My guess
Psilocybe cyanescens
They were found in mid-november in the Salish Coast region of Cascadia. They were growing out of woodchips composed of a mixture of western hemlock (majority), and western red cedar.
Side view of one full mature specimen:
A group with a sample of the substrate (the cap appears to be umbonate):
A closeup side view, and internal view of the stem (it appears to be hollow):
Cross section of the gills — they appear to be adnate, or sub-decurrent:
Underside of view of the gills:
Spore print (first on white background (the split is due to two halves), second on a black background):
Examples specimens once dried:
Examples of the colony, and the location/substrate in which it was growing:
Cross-posts:
Mushroom species have different geographic ranges and it's hard to identify species from a photo unless you've seen it in real life so global groups tend to be less useful than local groups.
Also the accessibility of the fediverise as a platform is an issue. The best place to go for PNW mushroom identification is a Facebook group as much as I hate to say it.
I know I directly mentioned this community, but I was more inferring generally about internet forums. When referring to this one specifically, it would be with the hope of it becoming large enough to have sufficient numbers of people with the expertise necessary to answer mycological questions.
I share that hope, I've been trying to post to [email protected] pretty regularly.
I completely forgot about that community! Perhaps I'll cross-post this there as well.
Interesting point! Though I don't entirely see why Facebook would need to be the community of choice instead of another. Why not hypothetically establish a local instance of Lemmy for the same end? Or were you more talking about facebook's already established size, so it's less work?
It's already established and a lot of highly knowledgeable local mycologists already hang out there and have no interest in switching to another platform.
Just gotta make Lemmy more enticing 😜