Pleura Small Coin (Pleurocollybia imbricata)
Pleura Small Coin (Pleurocollybia imbricata)
Pleurocollybia imbricata is a small shelf-forming gilled mushroom found in tropical rainforest in Belize and São Tomé, growing in overlapping tiers on well-rotted logs. It has been collected exactly twice in the entire scientific record, once in 2004 and once in 2008. Since 2020 its accepted name has been Callistosporium imbricatum, after DNA work dissolved the genus it was originally named in.
Pleurocollybia imbricata T.J. Baroni, Lodge & D.L. Lindner — Callistosporiaceae — Agaricales
Pleurocollybia imbricata is a tropical wood-decay mushroom that fruits in dense overlapping shelves on rotting hardwood, described from a single log in the Maya Mountains of Belize in 2008 and recorded once more from a rainforest trail on the West African island of São Tomé. Its caps are small, greyish, and covered in a fine frosted bloom, and its gills are so tightly packed that some of them fuse together and sprout small white tufts. The whole species is known from two herbarium collections and six DNA sequences. There is no photograph library, no cultivation protocol, and no chemistry.
What Is Pleurocollybia imbricata?
Pleurocollybia imbricata is a pleurotoid agaric, meaning a gilled mushroom that grows sideways out of wood with the stem placed off-centre or missing entirely. Instead of standing upright on the ground, fruitbodies emerge from the side and underside of decaying logs and stack in shingled tiers, one cap partly overlapping the next. In the Belize material the stem was reduced to roughly one millimetre in both dimensions. In the African material there was no stem at all, just a white felted attachment point.
The species epithet is the source of a persistent misunderstanding. Baroni and colleagues state plainly that Pleurocollybia imbricata is named for its overlapping caps, like roof tiles, and not for any scaly texture on the cap surface. In many other fungi an epithet of imbricatus signals a cap covered in raised scales. Here it describes the growth habit of the colony as a whole. The cap surface itself is hoary and canescent, meaning coated in a fine whitish bloom that looks frosted, with darker brown showing through underneath.
Fruitbodies arise from a thick white matted mycelial crust called a subiculum that spreads across the surface of the wood. This crust is a real field character, not a detail buried in a description. The African collection also produced numerous white rhizomorphs, which are cords of bundled mycelium that function like roots running across the substrate. Both features point to a fungus that colonises a log extensively before it fruits.
Commercially, Pleurocollybia imbricata circulates under the trade name "Pleura Small Coin," which appears only in marketplace listings for agar cultures and traces back to a single Malaysian vendor. No mycologist, forager, or regional ethnomycological record uses it. The name is a literal word-for-word rendering of the Latin, since Collybia derives from a term meaning small coin and Pleuro refers to the off-centre stem that Singer used to define the genus. It is a translation, not a vernacular name.
The most counterintuitive fact about this species: the entire global scientific record for Pleurocollybia imbricata consists of two collections, made four years and roughly 7,000 kilometres apart, on opposite sides of the Atlantic. Their internal DNA barcode region matches at about 99 percent. Either this is a genuinely amphi-Atlantic tropical fungus, or it is a pair of cryptic species that the standard barcode cannot separate. With a sample size of two, nobody can currently tell.
Interested in this species? Out-Grow carries a liquid culture.
Pleurocollybia imbricata Liquid CultureHow Is Pleurocollybia imbricata Classified?
The classification of Pleurocollybia imbricata changed fundamentally in 2020, and most of the internet has not caught up. The name under which the species was described, sequenced, and is still sold remains the searchable one, but it is no longer the accepted one.
| Rank | Classification |
|---|---|
| Kingdom | Fungi |
| Division | Basidiomycota |
| Class | Agaricomycetes |
| Order | Agaricales |
| Suborder | Tricholomatineae |
| Family | Callistosporiaceae |
| Genus | Callistosporium (formerly Pleurocollybia) |
| Species | Callistosporium imbricatum, basionym Pleurocollybia imbricata |
| MycoBank | MB510698 (basionym), MB831399 (new combination) |
Pleurocollybia imbricata naming history and type collection
The species was published as Pleurocollybia imbricata T.J. Baroni, Lodge & D.L. Lindner in Mycotaxon 103, page 355, in 2008. The holotype, meaning the single physical specimen that permanently anchors the name, is Baroni collection 9847, deposited at the Belize national herbarium with duplicates at New York and Cortland. It was collected on 13 August 2004 in Cayo District, in the Maya Mountains at a site called Doyle's Delight, at 1,035 metres elevation, from a fallen decaying hardwood log.
In 2020 Vizzini and colleagues transferred the species to Callistosporium, creating the currently accepted combination Callistosporium imbricatum. The relationship between the two names is simple. There is one basionym and one new combination, with no tangle of competing synonyms. Anyone verifying the name in Index Fungorum, GBIF, or NCBI will land on Callistosporium imbricatum with Pleurocollybia imbricata listed as a synonym.
Why the genus Pleurocollybia was absorbed into Callistosporium
Singer erected Pleurocollybia in 1947 for a single species, and he built the genus on four characters. Those were an off-centre stem, hyphae without clamp connections, unusually small spores, and the absence of necropigments, which are coloured pigments that darken as tissue ages and dies. He explicitly separated it from Callistosporium, whose members carry abundant bright necropigments.
A five-marker molecular analysis using the ITS barcode region, two ribosomal genes, and two protein-coding genes recovered Pleurocollybia sitting inside a monophyletic Callistosporium, meaning the two names described a single natural group. Vizzini and colleagues formally sank Pleurocollybia as a synonym and moved three species across, Pleurocollybia imbricata among them. The conceptual result matters more than the name change. The two characters Singer built the genus on, stem position and pigment chemistry, turned out to carry no genus-level phylogenetic signal in this lineage at all.
A second blow had already landed in 2017. Pleurocollybia cibaria, the only member of the genus with any commercial or culinary history, was shown to belong to Gerhardtia in a completely different family, Lyophyllaceae. Every claim online that Pleurocollybia contains an edible market mushroom traces back to that reassigned species, and none of it applies to Pleurocollybia imbricata.
Pleurocollybia imbricata family placement across databases
Family placement is where public databases currently contradict each other, so it is worth stating the correct answer clearly. The family is Callistosporiaceae, in the suborder Tricholomatineae. It is not Physalacriaceae or Omphalotaceae, which is the usual guess for anything with a collybioid name, and it is not Tricholomataceae, which is what several long-standing portals still display.
| Source | Genus shown | Family shown |
|---|---|---|
| Index Fungorum | Callistosporium (accepted) | Callistosporiaceae |
| GBIF backbone | Callistosporium (accepted) | Callistosporiaceae |
| NCBI Taxonomy | Callistosporium | Callistosporiaceae |
| MycoPortal | Pleurocollybia | Tricholomataceae (outdated) |
| basidio.org | Pleurocollybia | Biannulariaceae (superseded) |
The lineage has moved several times. It sat in Tricholomataceae in the 2008 protologue, then in the callistosporioid clade of a 2002 large-scale analysis, then in an emended Catathelasmataceae in 2016, then in Biannulariaceae, before Callistosporiaceae was erected for it in 2020. A six-gene reorganisation of the Agaricales published in 2024 keeps Callistosporiaceae where Vizzini put it. Alongside Callistosporium, the family holds Anupama, Guyanagarika, Macrocybe, Pseudolaccaria, and Xerophorus.
How Do You Identify Pleurocollybia imbricata?
Two published descriptions of Pleurocollybia imbricata exist, and they differ enough that presenting only one would be misleading. The Belize type collection produced larger, stemmed, densely shelving fruitbodies. The São Tomé collection produced smaller, stemless ones with less crowded gills. Both are treated as the same species on the strength of their DNA.
Pleurocollybia imbricata macroscopic characters
One further surface oddity is worth watching for. The frosted coating on the cap of Pleurocollybia imbricata often grows over and around small fragments of woody debris, trapping particles on the cap surface as it expands. The result is a cap that looks slightly dirty in a very specific way, with embedded litter rather than surface litter.
Pleurocollybia imbricata microscopic characters
Pleurocollybia imbricata lookalikes and how to separate them
Pleurocollybia apoda and Pleurocollybia paradoxa
Both also lose the stem at maturity, but neither forms shelving overlapping colonies, both lack cheilocystidia, and both have smooth glossy caps instead of the frosted bloom. Pleurocollybia apoda reaches 42 mm and is pale ochre. Pleurocollybia paradoxa tops out near 11 mm and is pale cinnamon brown.
Pleurocollybia praemultifolia
The genus type species, and the closest match on habit. It is also shelving with cheilocystidia, but the cap is chestnut brown and glabrous rather than greyish and frosted, the stem is merely off-centre rather than reduced to a nub, it does not arise from a white crust, and it smells of anise.
Pleurocollybia amara
Not shelving. It has a central, smooth, white stem, no cheilocystidia, clamp connections present throughout, and much larger spores at 5.6 to 7.2 by 3 to 4 µm, roughly double the volume of the spores of Pleurocollybia imbricata.
Pyrrhoglossum species
The most instructive field confusion, and the one that actually happened. The São Tomé collection was initially filed as a Pyrrhoglossum. The separation is microscopic and absolute. Pyrrhoglossum produces rusty brown warted spores, giving a brown spore print, while Pleurocollybia imbricata produces smooth hyaline spores and a white print.
Small pleurotoid agarics generally
Small stemless wood-dwelling gilled mushrooms converge heavily on the same silhouette. Callistosporium proper, small Pleurotus, and Marasmiellus species all overlap in the field. Published notes acknowledge that these genera are similar enough that sequence database misidentifications are plausible.
Key confirming combination
Shelving tiered caps with a frosted grey bloom, a white mycelial crust on the wood, extremely crowded gills, a white spore print, spores near 3 by 2.5 µm, branched contorted cheilocystidia, and a strongly bitter taste. No other described species combines all of these.
Pleurocollybia imbricata identification pitfalls
Five traps worth knowing. First, the epithet describes overlapping fruitbodies, not a scaly cap. Second, the spores sit near the resolution limit of ordinary light microscopy at roughly 3 by 2.5 µm, so oil immersion and a KOH mount are not optional. Historical measurements in this genus were badly wrong for exactly this reason. Third, clamp connections are unreliable here, being absent in one collection and present only at basidial bases in the other. Fourth, cheilocystidia shape differs between the two known collections, so a single deviating specimen should not be excluded on that basis alone. Fifth, any culture sold under this name should be treated as unverified unless it comes with a DNA sequence and collection provenance.
Where Does Pleurocollybia imbricata Grow?
Pleurocollybia imbricata is a saprotroph, meaning it feeds by decomposing dead organic matter rather than by partnering with a living plant. Specifically it is lignicolous, growing on wood. Both known collections came from well-rotted hardwood in humid tropical primary forest, at the interface where the log meets moss and soil. In Belize the fruitbodies were on the side and underside of a large downed dicot log 40 to 60 cm in diameter, growing over mosses. In São Tomé they were densely gregarious on soil over very rotten wood.
The trophic mode has one practical consequence worth stating. Because Pleurocollybia imbricata is a wood decomposer rather than a root symbiont, pure culture and substrate-based work are theoretically possible without a plant partner. That distinguishes it sharply from Guyanagarika, the ectomycorrhizal genus in the same family, which forms an obligate partnership with tree roots and cannot be grown to fruiting without a host.
| Locality | Details | Date |
|---|---|---|
| Belize, Cayo District | Maya Mountains, Doyle's Delight, 1,035 m elevation, north trail to creek from summit; holotype collection | 13 August 2004 |
| São Tomé, Gulf of Guinea | Parque Nacional Obô, trail to Lagoa Amelia, primary forest; second world record | 14 April 2008 |
Those two entries are the complete known distribution of Pleurocollybia imbricata. GBIF holds a single occurrence under the old name, the Belize holotype at New York, and returns three records in total when queried by name. MycoPortal reports the same three. For scale, the genus Callistosporium as a whole carries roughly 3,584 GBIF occurrences, overwhelmingly citizen-science observations of two common temperate species.
A distribution error worth correcting. Table 1 of the 2008 protologue lists the distribution of Pleurocollybia imbricata as "Florida." The paper's own text, title, and holotype data all say Belize, and the 2018 updated genus key gives Belize. The Florida entry is a typographical slip that downstream sources have occasionally repeated.
Seasonality cannot honestly be described. The Belize collection was made in August and the São Tomé collection in April. Both fall in wet-season months at low-latitude sites, which is suggestive but proves nothing from two data points. Ecological role is likewise inferred rather than measured. The species behaves as a late-stage wood decomposer that spreads an extensive white mycelial mat and rhizomorph network across the substrate before fruiting. No decay-type study, enzyme work, or community ecology exists for it.
No conservation assessment has been made. There is no IUCN listing and no national status anywhere. Both collections came from within protected areas, the Maya Mountains in Belize and Parque Nacional Obô in São Tomé, which is at least mildly reassuring. In practical terms Pleurocollybia imbricata is a data-deficient tropical species, and no introduced population has been documented anywhere.
Can You Cultivate Pleurocollybia imbricata?
The honest answer is that nobody has published an attempt. There is no cultivation study for Pleurocollybia imbricata, no substrate trial, no fruiting protocol, no yield figure, no biological efficiency percentage, and no documented isolate in any public culture collection. The species' own MeSH record shows a literature frequency of zero, meaning it has never been used as an indexing term on an indexed research article.
The reasons are structural rather than mysterious. Only two collections exist worldwide, both from remote protected tropical forest, so there has been almost no material to work from. The taste is recorded as strongly bitter, and bitterness runs through the whole genus, so there has never been a culinary incentive. Fruitbodies are small and thin-fleshed, with flesh around one millimetre thick, which makes the yield economics unattractive before anyone even starts. The one genus member with a market history turned out to belong to a different family entirely.
Pleurocollybia imbricata cultivation parameters currently known
One vendor claim deserves specific comment because it is at least internally coherent. The commercial listing describes the mycelium as fast and aggressively rhizomorphic, meaning it forms rope-like strands rather than diffuse fuzz. That is consistent with the field record, which describes a thick white matted crust in Belize and numerous white rhizomorphs in São Tomé. Consistency is not verification. The species has never been isolated into culture in the published record, and only two herbarium collections exist on Earth, so a buyer should ask any vendor for the DNA sequence and collection provenance of the isolate before accepting the identification.
A realistic research pathway for Pleurocollybia imbricata
Fruiting is not the goal here, at least not yet. What is achievable with a live culture is vegetative characterisation, which is precisely the work that has never been done and would be publishable if it were.
Establish and verify the isolate
Transfer to fresh malt extract agar and confirm the culture is clean and dikaryotic. Because clamp connections are unreliable in this species, verification should rest on colony consistency and, ideally, on sequencing rather than on microscopy alone.
Sequence before anything else
The single highest-value action available. Amplify the ITS barcode region and, if possible, the protein-coding gene rpb2. Compare against the six published accessions, all of which derive from just two vouchers. A sequence from a commercial isolate would settle whether cultures sold under this name are the real thing.
Characterise growth on agar
Record radial extension in millimetres per day across a temperature series, with a tropical-origin bias toward roughly 24 to 30 °C. Test malt extract, potato dextrose, and an oak sawdust extract medium. None of these numbers exists anywhere in the literature.
Expand into liquid culture and grain
Move verified mycelium into liquid culture to build volume, then to sterilised grain spawn. Observe whether growth is dispersed or pelleted in liquid, which is unrecorded for this species and directly useful to anyone scaling it later.
Trial well-rotted hardwood
Wild fruiting occurs on late-stage decayed hardwood, not fresh wood. Supplemented hardwood sawdust that has been pre-colonised or partially broken down is the closest analogue, kept warm and humid to mirror lowland tropical forest.
Log everything, including failure
The literature on Pleurocollybia imbricata cultivation is empty. A documented negative result, with substrate, temperature, and duration recorded, is a genuine contribution and more useful than an undocumented success.
Contamination expectations, clearly labelled as inference. No contamination data exists for this species. Reasoning from its biology, a late-stage tropical wood saprotroph adapted to well-rotted substrate is unlikely to outcompete Trichoderma or bacterial contaminants on rich media at warm incubation temperatures. Treat it as a slow, vulnerable culture and work with correspondingly strict sterile technique. There is no experimental support for this expectation, only the ecology.
What the Pleurocollybia imbricata liquid culture is for
This is a research and characterisation culture, not a grow kit. It contains live mycelium suspended in sterile nutrient broth, ready to inoculate agar plates, grain spawn, or supplemented hardwood substrate. Because no fruiting protocol exists for this species anywhere in the literature, the value here is in the vegetative work. Growth rate on defined media, temperature optima, liquid growth morphology, and above all a published DNA sequence from a living isolate are all genuinely unknown, and all of them are within reach of a careful hobbyist with sterile technique. Approach it as an unstudied organism rather than a production species.
What Bioactive Compounds Does Pleurocollybia imbricata Contain?
None have ever been identified. No compound has been isolated, extracted, quantified, or assayed from Pleurocollybia imbricata. There are no IC₅₀ values, meaning the concentration at which a substance inhibits a biological process by half, no MIC values, meaning the lowest concentration that stops microbial growth, and no antioxidant assay results of any kind. This is not a gap in this article. It is a gap in the world.
What does exist is a chemically defined negative that carries real taxonomic weight. Pleurocollybia was partly defined by the absence of necropigments in its spores, basidia, and gill tissue. Callistosporium, the genus that now contains this species, is characterised as having those pigments at least in part, including dimeric anthraquinones such as skyrin and hypericin, which oxidise and cause visible darkening in both living and dried fruitbodies.
Necropigments
Explicitly absent. This absence was one of the founding characters Singer used to separate Pleurocollybia from Callistosporium in 1947.
Cap cuticle pigment
The African collection showed a pale yellow pigment held within hyphal walls and insoluble in 3 percent KOH. Observed but never chemically characterised.
Bitter principle
The taste is recorded as strongly bitter, and bitterness runs through the genus. The responsible compound has never been isolated or named.
Assay data
None. No antimicrobial, antioxidant, cytotoxicity, or enzyme-inhibition assay has ever been run on this species at any evidence tier.
Do not extrapolate from the new genus name. It would be easy to write that Pleurocollybia imbricata may contain skyrin and hypericin because it now sits in Callistosporium. That inference is unsupported. Those pigments are precisely the characters absent from the former Pleurocollybia species, which is why Singer separated the two genera in the first place. The genus is explicitly heterogeneous for this trait, so a chemistry claim extrapolated across it would be worthless.
Is Pleurocollybia imbricata Safe to Eat?
No. Pleurocollybia imbricata should be treated as not for consumption. No source anywhere asserts that it is edible, no toxicological study has ever been attempted, and no poisoning case report or clinical record exists. The species' MeSH record shows a literature frequency of zero, and searches of the clinical literature return nothing for the species, the genus, or the family beyond taxonomic and floristic papers.
Known toxins
None identified, because none have been looked for. Absence of identified toxins in an untested species is not a safety finding.
Poisoning reports
No entry in any poisoning literature was located for this species or for the genus.
Organoleptic warning
The taste is recorded in the original description as strongly bitter and mealy. Bitterness is a genus-level trait and is used as a key character.
Nearest assessed relative
Callistosporium luteo-olivaceum, in the same genus, is described as inedible with edibility otherwise unknown. Reference sources decline to give an edibility rating for it.
Primary real-world risk
Misidentification. The species was itself initially confused with Pyrrhoglossum in the field, and small pleurotoid agarics converge strongly on one another.
Drug interactions and handling
No data of any kind. No mechanism, interaction, or handling hazard has been described for this species.
Absence of evidence is not evidence of safety. The complete lack of toxicity data for Pleurocollybia imbricata reflects the fact that only two collections have ever been made and no toxicological work has ever been done. A wild-collected, intensely bitter, chemically uncharacterised tropical agaric known from two specimens is not a candidate for the table under any circumstances.
There is also no ethnomycological record. Pleurocollybia imbricata was unknown to science until 2008 and has been collected only by visiting research expeditions inside national parks. No traditional use, no historical herbal use, and no supplement or extract product exists for it. The only commerce anywhere is the novelty agar culture listing.
What Makes Pleurocollybia imbricata Remarkable?
How Pleurocollybia imbricata helped dissolve its own genus
Singer built Pleurocollybia on stem position and pigment chemistry. Molecular work showed that neither character carries genus-level meaning in this lineage, and the genus collapsed into Callistosporium in 2020. It is a clean textbook case of morphological convergence, where an off-centre stem and a lack of dark pigments evolved independently rather than marking a shared ancestry. Pleurocollybia imbricata was one of the three sequenced species that made the case.
The migrating stem of Pleurocollybia imbricata
The stem starts central and quickly becomes strongly off-centre or fully lateral, ending at roughly one millimetre in each direction. In the African material it is gone altogether. More suggestively, the single immature fruitbody found growing on top of the log, rather than on its side or underside, was funnel-shaped rather than fan-shaped. That single observation hints that substrate orientation relative to gravity drives the entire growth form, but it rests on one specimen.
Fused gills and pubescent outgrowths in Pleurocollybia imbricata
The gills of Pleurocollybia imbricata are so tightly packed that some have grown together, and the fused edges frequently produce ball-like clumps of white downy outgrowths. Hymenial fusion generating sterile fuzzy tufts is genuinely unusual among agarics, and it has never been studied developmentally in this species or, as far as the record shows, explained anywhere.
Pleurocollybia imbricata spore size and the limits of light microscopy
At roughly 3 by 2.5 µm, and essentially as wide as they are long, the spores sit at the small end of the range for gilled mushrooms. Singer considered such minute spores very small for an agaric and used them as a founding character of the genus. Their size has practical consequences. Historical measurements of a related species were reported as 1.5 to 2.0 µm and later corrected to 2.8 to 3.2 by 2.4 to 2.8 µm from the type specimen, an error of nearly a factor of two caused by working at the edge of what a light microscope can resolve.
The trans-Atlantic disjunction of Pleurocollybia imbricata
Belize and São Tomé are roughly 7,000 kilometres apart, on opposite sides of the Atlantic. The two collections share the ITS barcode region at about 99 percent, which is what justified applying the Belize name to the African material despite consistent morphological differences in size, gill spacing, cheilocystidia branching, and clamp presence. Whether this is one widespread tropical species or a cryptic species pair that ITS cannot resolve is untestable with a sample size of two. It is the single most tractable open question about this fungus.
Clamp connections in Pleurocollybia imbricata and its relatives
Clamp connections, which are small bridges cells build during division in many fungi, are essentially absent throughout the callistosporioid group. The African collection of this species is the notable exception, showing clamps only at the bases of basidia. Outside one Caribbean species, it is the only member of the group known to show clamps at all, which makes the character diagnostically useless here and biologically interesting.
Nutritional mode shifts within Callistosporiaceae
The family that holds Pleurocollybia imbricata also holds Guyanagarika, an ectomycorrhizal genus whose members form nutrient-exchange partnerships with tree roots. A single small family containing both wood-rotting saprotrophs and root symbionts implies at least one shift in nutritional mode within a compact evolutionary group, which is exactly the kind of transition that makes small families worth sequencing.
Why the edible Pleurocollybia was never a relative
The most persistent factual trap in this entire topic is Pleurocollybia cibaria, a wild edible sold in Peruvian markets and described by Singer in 1963. Molecular and morphological work moved it to Gerhardtia in Lyophyllaceae, a different family. Any page claiming ethnomycological history or edibility for "Pleurocollybia" is describing a species that no longer belongs to the genus and never had any relationship to Pleurocollybia imbricata.
Open questions worth someone's time. Three projects would each move this species forward measurably. Sequencing rpb2 or tef1 from any commercial culture sold under this name would settle the identity question outright. Targeted re-collection in Belize during August and São Tomé during April, with culture isolation on site, would triple the world's material. A multilocus test of the trans-Atlantic disjunction would resolve whether one species or two is involved. None of these requires a large budget, which is unusual for an open question in mycology.
Also available as a culture plate from Out-Grow.
Pleurocollybia imbricata Culture PlateFrequently Asked Questions About Pleurocollybia imbricata
Is Pleurocollybia imbricata the same as Callistosporium imbricatum?
Yes. They are the same fungus under two names. Pleurocollybia imbricata is the original name, published in 2008, and it remains the name under which the species was described, sequenced, indexed, and sold. Callistosporium imbricatum is the currently accepted name, created in 2020 when molecular work showed that the genus Pleurocollybia sat inside Callistosporium and could not be maintained separately. Index Fungorum, GBIF, and NCBI all list the 2020 name as accepted and the 2008 name as a synonym.
Is Pleurocollybia imbricata edible?
No, and it should not be eaten. Edibility has never been tested, no toxicology study exists, and the original description records the taste as strongly bitter and mealy. Bitterness runs through the whole genus and is used as a key character in identification. The nearest relative with any assessed status, Callistosporium luteo-olivaceum, is described as inedible. The absence of toxicity data reflects the fact that only two collections of this species have ever been made, not any finding of safety.
Where does Pleurocollybia imbricata grow?
It is known from exactly two places. The first is Doyle's Delight in the Maya Mountains of Cayo District, Belize, at 1,035 metres, collected in August 2004 from a large fallen hardwood log. The second is Parque Nacional Obô on São Tomé, in the Gulf of Guinea off West Africa, collected in April 2008 from very rotten wood in primary forest. Both sites are humid tropical primary forest, and in both cases the fungus was growing on well-decayed hardwood at the interface of wood, moss, and soil.
Can you grow Pleurocollybia imbricata at home?
Not to fruiting, because no protocol exists. There is no published substrate formulation, spawn run temperature, fruiting trigger, flush count, or biological efficiency figure for this species, and any number circulating online should be assumed to have been copied from an unrelated organism. Vegetative work is achievable. It is a wood-rotting saprotroph, so it needs no plant partner, and malt extract agar is the only medium of record. The most valuable thing a home cultivator could do with a live culture is sequence it and publish the result.
What does the name imbricata mean?
It comes from the Latin imbricatus, meaning overlapping like roof tiles, and it refers to the way the fruitbodies stack in shingled tiers on the log. It does not refer to a scaly cap surface, which is what the same epithet usually indicates in other fungi. The cap of Pleurocollybia imbricata is actually frosted with a fine whitish bloom rather than scaly. This is one of the most common misreadings of the species.
Is "Pleura Small Coin" a real common name for this species?
No. It is a vendor trade name that appears only in marketplace listings for agar cultures, all traceable to a single Malaysian culture supplier and its storefronts. No mycological source uses it, and there is no record of it in any regional or ethnomycological tradition. The phrase is a literal back-translation of the scientific name, since Collybia derives from a word meaning small coin and Pleuro refers to the off-centre stem. The searchable and scientifically meaningful name is Pleurocollybia imbricata.